


Tiger By The Tail

by ivorygates



Series: Tiger'verse [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: "Ripple Effect" AU, Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Excessive Profanity, F/F, F/M, Just All Kinds Of Violent Violence Okay?, Language, M/M, Other, Threats of Violence, Violence, Violent Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-26
Updated: 2011-08-26
Packaged: 2017-10-23 02:04:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 36,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In "Ripple Effect" we got glimpses of a number of different SG-1s.  This is the story of the "Tiger Grey Camo" Team.  Daniverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tiger By The Tail

The locals call P7R-14B "Avranath". It's the stronghold of an Alliance fuck named Tarik, who's one of their main suppliers for tretonin. SG-1 was supposed to shag ass in, hit the place hard and fast, grab all the manufacturing data and any scientists they could find, and blow everything else to shit. A great plan. It would have worked one _fuck_ of a lot better if Tarik hadn't been there and the goatfucker who sold them the intel hadn't turned around and sold _them._ They shoot their way out and run for the Gate with all God's Jaffa on their asses. If Sam hadn't laid down the usual string of mines around the Gate, Cam wouldn't've had the time to argue with whatever _dickwad fuckhead_ is on the other end when he dials in. It takes the SGC ninety seconds to send the "All Clear", and by then Tarik's tapeworm army's cleared the last string of mines.

He throws a last block of C4 in their direction and runs up the steps. Sam's right beside him; T and Jackson bringing up the rear. Staff-weapons're accurate like he's a virgin, but those bastards are getting _close_. So they come in hot -- they almost always come in hot -- and the Gate Room's all wrong and it's full of people pointing guns at them. They fall into defense position without taking time to think, Jackson and Teal'c up and covering, him and Sam down to sweep the room. And he's just registering there's a him -- _another_ him -- when in the corner of his eye he sees Jackson settle back and get ready to hose down the room. He barely gets his hand on her weapon in time to yank it down and out of her hands before the Armed Response Team can take them _all_ out.

"What the hell is going on here?" he demands as he stands up, because sure as hell that wasn't General O'Neill on the other end of the blower and O'Neill wouldn't have dicked them around when they had a fuckton of Alliance Jaffa on their ass.

Jackson grabs her MG4 back from him and doesn't quite snarl. Cam lets her have it because Jackson gets really pissy when you take her toys away from her, and Teal'c's seen what Cam's seen. He knows the T-man will keep Jackson from shooting anybody for a couple minutes. And afterward, it might not matter.

#

The Armed Response Team looks nervous as shit, but nobody comes for their weapons when they reach the foot of the ramp. Don't matter. Cam's looking into his own face (the way he might'a looked a hundred years ago) and his double asks them to follow him. Sam and Teal'c look at him and Cam shrugs. They don't have much choice right now but to check into the Hotel California. This side of the Gate they're stuck unless de la Torres gets religion and wants to dial them out on her own initiative, and Cam doesn't see her up there.

Nobody's actually _telling_ them any damned thing, but they're talking all around them, and Cam picks up pretty quick this is some kind of Alternate Universe and they aren't the first guys who've got tossed here today. These people are all soft and friendly and babble like drains. He cuts eyes with his team. T looks disgusted. Sam looks interested. Jackson just looks pissed (same old same old). They're taken under guard to the Armory. He keeps an eye on Jackson the whole way: they came in _hot_ dammit, and O'Neill knows when they do the first fucking damned thing you do is get Jackson's gear away from her before she manages to forget she's back in friendly territory. Or decides she doesn't happen to give a fucking fuck this bright particular day. He'd turn right around and grease the lot of these fucks -- Sam could dial them out to Epsilon Hardsite and they could be through the Gate before the bodies finished hitting the floor -- except she's got a thinky look on her face now and what if Epsilon ain't _there?_

So he guesses they play along. For now.

The Armory sergeant isn't Tomoyasu. The woman behind the counter starts to smile at him as Cam steps up to it and lays his M240 down. Cam doesn't smile back as he shrugs off his tac-vest and sets it beside his weapon. Then all three of his pistols (the two SGC Standard Issue Colt 1911s loaded with Black Talon ammo -- it won't go through plate armor, but it'll go through just about anything else -- and his hideout piece, a Glock 9 in a clip-in holster tucked down at the small of his back). Then his knives: the machete on his belt, the Fairbairn-Sykes strapped to his thigh, both his boot knives.

The sergeant-who-isn't-Tomoyasu is noting everything down as she logs it in. What worries Cam is she's having to write a lot of it out -- her forms don't seem to cover a lot of his gear. When she asks him if he's got any "unexpended ordnance" in his vest, Cam says, "Well, shit, Sarge, I'm guessing yeah. You want me to expend it here?"

Alt-him clears his throat, and suddenly Cam realizes just how still and quiet everyone around them's gotten. "I don't think that's going to be necessary, Colonel," the Other Guy says quietly.

Cam might feel called upon to explain to him just what an asshole he probably is, but Sam sashays up to the counter and slams down her M107 defiantly. She can put one through a tango's eye at 7500 yards with it. The rest of her load is about the same as his.

"I don't think I have an unexpended ordnance, sergeant," Sam says sweetly, as she lays down her vest. "I think I used it all up blowing a bunch of Jaffa to shit."

Jackson snickers.

Teal'c carries a light staff canon they pulled out of a Death Glider. He don't bother with handguns, but he likes knives. Carries a _Goa'uld_ firestick, too. Comes in useful sometimes. When they have to talk to people.

Then it's Jackson's turn. Cam plucks her MG4 out of her hands and passes it across the counter; Jackson's got the look of a girl who doesn't want to be parted from her favorite teddybear just now. Cam isn't quite sure why everyone's still staring at them like they're four grenades with the pins out: time for that was _before_ they fucking went and fucking disarmed themselves. He and T watch Jackson carefully as she gives up her vest, pistols, hideout guns (back and ankle), machete, commando knife, the knife in her boot, and the bitty needle-sharp one she wears taped at the base of her neck. The blade's only as long as his thumb. It's long enough to kill with.

She stops and looks at him. "That ever'thing?" Cam asks quietly, because he knows damn well it ain't and they can't know they won't be searched. Jackson looks snake-eyed and murderous as she unbuckles her belt and drops her pants. There's a derringer (four shot, 357 magnum short-barrel loads) holstered on one thigh, and a Strider SMF taped to the other. She adds them to the pile on the counter. "You done?" he asks, and she nods, blank-faced. Then she smiles.

"Unless somebody here wants to do a cavity search."

He motions to her to cover it up. She's cheerful now (a bad sign) but at least she isn't _armed._ And from the way the locals started twitching the moment Jackson dropped her pants, Cam thinks now they could all probably've walked back through the Gate without a single shot fired if he'd just had Sam flash her titties at 'em. Question stands, though: where'd they be when they got to the other side?

#

After the Armory comes the Infirmary. They changed out the Gate Room Team for a set of SFs on the way. The SFs're carrying M16s, and he supposes that makes them feel safe enough. He and T could take them away, and then they'd have weapons again--

He stops himself heading down that particular primrose path. The point in being armed is to escape, and it helps to have somewhere to escape _to._ Sam isn't giving him anything like a high sign, and he doesn't have the privacy to ask her what the fuck she's thinking. He'll wait a while longer.

Not long.

He desperately wants a smoke (usually stops for one Gateside; today they had all God's fucking Jaffa up their fucking asses) but you can't smoke down here. He's still got a pack in his shirt though; he figures he'll light up as soon as he gets a little privacy. (Hey, not his SGC.)

Cam doesn't see any familiar faces in the Infirmary. But there's at least two other sets of _them_ there, and there's information right there, though nothing he can make use of himself. While they're waiting their turn, Jackson offers to blow their guards. She's stripped down to her boots and underwear, standing in front of one of the beds popping her gum, and somehow she manages to look and sound like one of the sixteen-year-old carhops at the drive-in outside the town where Cam grew up (the town he's never going back to again until the last time he goes back there). The SFs try to pretend they haven't heard her.

"Don't know what you're missin', boys," Cam says helpfully. "Jackson here can make you shoot so hard you won't never need to have sex again in this life."

"Won't be _able_ to," Sam says from the other bed.

"Excuse me. You're the, ah, the SG-1 that came in from P7R-14B?" The voice is familiar. Cam turns and looks at her full on.

It's Carolyn Lam.

Knowing you're not in your own home place is one thing. Seeing dead people get up and walk is another. He'd dated her some while before he married, and Belle kept in touch, so he knew Carolyn was at the CDC for the Spring Surprise. And he knew the CDC got smacked in a fuck-you-and-come-to-Jesus way when Atlanta was blown to shit by the _Goa'uld_.

For just a moment he's glad she's here (thinks of Belle; maybe Belle's here somewhere, maybe she'd see him), because Colorado Springs is one of the safest cities on Earth these days, even if the Alliance finds its balls or the so-called Free Jaffa fuck them over or the _Goa'uld_ Empire comes back from the dead. Then he remembers this isn't the real Colorado Springs, and it isn't.

Carolyn and her guys want to run tests on them. Cam doesn't know what she's looking for, but he never knows what the docs are looking for. He glances at Sam and shrugs slightly, telling her to play along for now. "Jus' don't you go stickin' me with nothing, honey. I'm scared a needles," he says.

Jackson sits on the edge of her bed in bra and panties, swinging her feet, popping her gum. Daring anyone to say anything.

Carolyn's quick enough -- it's all stuff he's used to -- and there _is_ a needle, but it's empty when it goes into his arm, so he doesn't really give a fuck. She wants him to go pee into a cup, and he thinks it's safe enough, since Sam and T are still out here with Jackson. When he comes out, Jackson's telling Carolyn that if she tries shining a light in her eyes one more time she'll have the only cunt in the SGC with lighted valet parking.

Back home their CMO is Scots, a cowardly crazy little fuck whose taste for human experimentation'd get his license yanked and him jailed for war crimes if he was doing it to the enemy and not to them. Doing it to them is saving their lives on the other side of the Gate. So if Dr. Beckett is their pusher as well as their doctor, if half the SGC has a monkey on its back, if seventy percent of the Alliance prisoners they bring in don't make it to secondary processing because Doc Beckett has a new surgical technique he wants to try out, who gives a shit? He doesn't try them out on them until the odds are better. Or until the ratfucks leave him no choice. He takes care of them. And he's _willing_ to take care of them. And nothing else matters.

Maybe they could all afford to care about other things once upon a time. Cam knows they could. O'Neill loves Beckett for the miracles he works and hates the things he does to get them. Got drunk enough one night (there's a reason the SGC Infirmary is nicknamed the Roach Motel) to say Dr. Fraiser would _never_ \-- and wouldn't say anything more. Cam doesn't think Janet Fraiser (someone he knows only as a legend; before his time) could have done what has to be done (what Carson Beckett is happy to do). Not keeping them alive so much as killing them by inches instead of miles.

If anybody on their side actually _scares_ Cam, it's the Voodoo Doctor, and Cam never thought he'd miss Beckett, and he does.

"Are your eyes particularly light sensitive, Dr. Jackson?" Carolyn asks.

"No," Jackson says blandly, and puts her glasses back on. She has wraparound dark-tinted shields clipped to the inside, and it's not just to protect her from flying brass. She wears them most of the time.

Carolyn decides to move on. "Where did you get those injuries, Dr. Jackson?" she asks. She's looking at Jackson's scars now.

"I saved up my box-tops and sent away for them. What do you fucking think?" Jackson answers.

Cam thinks of telling her to behave. Decides against it. Once upon a time he would have -- the man he was (once) would have. He came to the SGC in April of '04, as soon as he got out of the hospital after Antarctica -- minor injuries; he'd been able to put his bird down on the ice and walk away, even though Brian was killed and Annabelle -- he'd named his bird for his best girl -- would never fly again. General O'Neill had asked for him. The SGC was short-staffed after the Spring Surprise and Disclosure.

They told Cam his parents were dead while he was still in the hospital. No details, but Anubis knocked Earth from hell to breakfast before the 'Skinners (and General Hammond, and _Prometheus_ , God rest 'em all) took out his mothership, and nobody anywhere on Earth took kindly to knowing they'd been secretly at war with evil space aliens for almost a decade. Things had been unsettled everywhere. He couldn't go home for the funerals, and he couldn't go home afterward: non-essential travel was still restricted (still is two years later, will be till the Last fucking Trump, Cam bets). And General O'Neill hadn't wanted Cam to know the whole true story of what happened, and sure, Cam knows why. He might not be as willing to bust his ass to save Earth if he knew.

The SGC is net-nannied (and that goes double for the Springs) but one of his cousins pulled a copy of the upload off the net and got it to him through a backdoor. Cam isn't sure whether it was out of kindness, or if Skip hates him as much as everyone else he used to know does. But it's how he saw the mob (not strangers -- it would've been easier if it were; these were the kids he'd gone to school with -- and their brothers -- and their fathers -- men whose names he knows) come to his house in the bright broad day and drag his Momma and Daddy out. They threw ropes up over the limb of the big oak in the front yard where the tire-swing used to be, and hanged them by their necks, and he saw his parents twist and claw. He knows there were other folks in the house that day -- Uncle Roy, Uncle Bayliss, Gran'ma Mitchell, Aunt Lavinia -- because it was a bright spring morning, the 18th of March. But they didn't come out, and Cam thinks they have to have been dead, because Momma was crying and shouting at the men (in anger, not fear; Cam knows his Momma) when they dragged her out. But there wasn't any audio on the file, so he doesn't know. There's no "why" of it, no explanation; Cam's read all the damnyankee articles and thinky-think pieces in the paper talking about "an unfortunate episode in our nation's history" and calling for "a time of healing". And they said the same fucking damned thing in 1865. His kin didn't forget then. Cam won't forget now.

Cam watched the file too many times before he deleted it. He'll remember what he saw for the rest of his life. His parents were still alive -- you strangle slow when you're hanged that way -- when Cousin Jesse, Carter's girl, came fishtailing into the drive in her little white Mustang and jumped out of the car with a shotgun in her hand. She went down when she was tasered, and the mob moved in.

For a few minutes, all there is to see is the backs of the mob, and Momma and Daddy dying. Then a couple of the men -- John Lucas from the Grange Hall and Sable Hooker from the B&B in town -- hold Jesse up for the camera to see. She's naked and bloody, but they aren't finished with her yet. In his mind, Cam fills the silence with a soundtrack of shouts and jeers, and he wonders if Carter sleeps well these days.

When they _are_ finished, someone walks in front of the camera with a can of gasoline. He can see that most of them have cans of gasoline by now. The mob starts to scatter. Most of them go up the steps into the house. Two of them stay behind, pouring gasoline all over Jesse beneath the camera's unblinking eye. Cam sees her flail weakly when they pour it over her face. She's still alive.

Then Maddox Jennings drops a match on her.

These are the people Cam's saving Earth for. And he'll do his job. But he doesn't know what he'll do with himself when his job is done. (Jackson says -- when she tries to comfort him -- that they won't live to see that day. It's both prayer and promise, and it's the only prayer Cam really has left.) And being derailed like this is _not in his fucking goddamned plans_. He has places to go, people to kill. A lot of people to kill actually (it's O'Neill's job -- Cam knows -- to make sure none of them's on Earth; come the day, they'll see who's the better man).

But Cam's learned patience, so for now he watches and waits. People here are talking about Ori, and plagues, and there are plagues back where Cam comes from, but he's never heard of the Ori. Everyone here's talking about a singularity that's ripped a hole in the fabric of reality, funneling all the SG-1's who try to Gate home here, too.

Nobody's talking about sending them back where they belong.

#

Once they're cleared in the Infirmary Cam figures they're going to be shunted off to some holding cell to cool their heels, but for some reason when they're taken up to 16 they're split up and their minders (wearing Team patches; nobody Cam recognizes) say they want to interview them. Cam tells Jackson to be a good girl (telling her with his eyes _for god's sake don't fuck up, Jackson_ ) and she gives him one of her poisoned-candy smirks as she walks away.

The guy who follows Cam into the interview room introduces himself as Colonel Reynolds. "Guess we don't have one of you where I'm from," Cam says, and Reynolds' easy smile flickers just a little.

There's a camera on the table (bait and switch; Cam knows the rooms are wired for sight and sound) and Reynolds wants his bio. Says they're working on sending them all back home, and Colonel Carter wants to find out how their universes are different from this one. Cam doesn't know whether this is home truth or a bag a'moonshine; the real kicker is he wasn't expecting this, so he didn't get a chance to tell the team how to play it. They all know better'n to give up anything tactical to hostiles, and they're all geared up to treat these people as hostiles, but the thing is, these hostiles don't seem to _know_ they're hostiles, so they can't just fucking _stonewall_ them. So he starts with the basics: Cameron Everett Mitchell, born 1970, oldest son of Everett Raymond Mitchell (USAF, ret. -- retired and _fucking murdered_ ) and Sara Gomer Mitchell neé Griffith of Black Mountain, Buncombe County, North Carolina. Former husband of Annabelle Sophia Campbell. Father of Rachel Cameron and Samuel Griffith. (He doesn't know what their last names are now, or where they even are: Belle took off while he was still in the hospital. On the books, he's still married. In a few more years he can divorce her on grounds of desertion. He'd do it now, but he's afraid of leading the same kind of people to her and his kids as killed Momma and Daddy and Jessie, because these days people figure anybody with anything to do with the Gate is some kind of responsible for the Spring Surprise. And maybe there's some truth in that, and maybe without the Gate it would'a been Apophis six years earlier. Or the steel spiders. Or something.)

Cam don't tell Reynolds all that, of course. None of his damned business. He just shows him their picture -- the one he always kept in Annabelle -- the other Annabelle -- the picture he still carries -- and says he's divorced.

He knows his story's got to match up with whatever the others're getting (he wishes 'em good luck in getting T to open his mouth and he hopes to fuck Jackson keeps her goddamned pants on), so he tells Reynolds as how President Hayes took the Program public during Anubis's attack on Earth because of the widespread panic. It turned out as how that was the wrong call: the Snakeskinners and _Prometheus_ took out enough of Anubis's fleet so the little fish turned tail and ran, but Hayes was assassinated a week later, and Vice President Kinsey took office. Kinsey never was a big fan of the Program, but having half Earth's cities smacked by a _Goa'uld_ fleet made him a righteous believer. He put Colonel O'Neill in charge of the SGC and did everything he could to keep all the folks on Earth from killing themselves while O'Neill -- man even got a set of stars out of the deal -- did everything _he_ could to keep the _Goa'uld_ from coming back and finishing them off.

They managed it. Only then they found out the _Goa'uld_ were like the big dog that keeps all the little dogs down. Cam doesn't mention that to Reynolds, either. He just says the _Goa'uld_ are mostly gone and they're dealing with a little Lucian Alliance problem these days. Reynolds says they got one'a those here too. Cam doesn't say that if they had an actual fucking problem they'd be acting less like a fucking Ladies' Aid Society and more like a military command.

He figures he'll get put back with his team after that and be able to find some place to catch a smoke (or else shot, depending on how well Jackson minded her manners and if they managed to piss off T), but he isn't. They put him into a holding pen with a baker's dozen of other hims. He bites back the crawling feeling at the base of his skull at seeing all these bad copies. They're supposed to be _him_ , but they look like cousins. They look like Ash. He doesn't know where Ash is. Doesn't know if he made it through the Spring Surprise. Could be not. But the DOD's servers were hacked right after the Spring Surprise and one of the things dumped onto the 'Net was the personnel roster for Project Heliotrope -- the name the Snakeskinners ran under on the books. It's why the Posse Comitatus went after Momma and Daddy. So they got Ash, or he's hiding, or he's _been_ hid, and which it is Cam's not like to ever know. Right now he's got a job to do.

Getting dumped in here tells Cam that no matter how much these folks think they're fighting a war, they don't have it bad here at all. The fat fuck with the eyebrows running this place should'a kept them all separated out if he didn't want them to find out anything useful. By the time he's on his third doughnut and his second cup of coffee, he's heard all about Jackson's sex change, _Sam's_ sex change, Sam being married to O'Neill (he can't think which of the three of them'd think that was funnier but his money's on Jackson), the Ori Menace (chapter and verse and how that space pirate -- Valerie something -- that Jackson whacked when she tried to hijack _Odyssey_ two years back is all tangled up in it somehow), two other ways Earth took out the _Goa'uld_ in Antarctica besides the one General Hammond and his kids used, and about every possible other way his life could'a gone -- from being the only survivor of the 'skinners and spending fourteen months in Secured Medical figuring out if he was ever gonna play hopscotch again, to getting off without a scratch along with all his boys and girls because General O'Neill fired up some Ancient Gatling Gun to bat clean-up.

There's too much fucking _noise_ in this room -- laughter and talking and it just _grates on his last goddamned nerve_ that all of these people are (supposed to be) him. All the happy shiny people whose worlds haven't been blown to fuck, whose parents are still alive, whose wives still love them, whose kids still know who their daddy is. Ray-Ray was six and SG was three the last time he saw them. They're nine and six now and he doesn't even know what they look like.

He doesn't even know if they're still alive.

The him wearing black (Cam wonders what kind of mission his team was on, but not enough to ask) tells Cam the local girl (Colonel Carter from here) thinks there's a tear in subspace caused by the Bitch Gate's wormhole passing too close to a black hole, and everybody who tries to get home just ends up here no matter where they start out from. "Wouldn't mind staying," he says, smiling at Cam. "But you know, I just ordered a buttload of movies from Netflix before I left, and I really need to get them back."

"Sure," Cam says. "Same here." He wonders if knowing what caused it means they can _fix it,_ and if they'll even want to. Might have more important things on their minds. Like mowing their fucking lawns. Or doing their goddamned cunting _laundry._ He holds up his cup _gotta get a refill_ and the guy in black who isn't him smiles and nods and waves him off. Easy. Cocky. The way Cam was one bright spring morning three years ago when he went off to do his job and bought an all-expense-paid ticket to Hell instead.

He's standing by the coffeemaker ( _always make it look good if someone's watching, Mitchell,_ O'Neill's voice whispers in his ear) when the SFs usher in yet another him. Camo pants, jump boots, black t (no shirt), and tags. He looks familiar (normal), and it takes Cam a moment to figure out why.

The new guy isn't smiling.

In the back of his head, Cam's thinking: _ally,_ because even further back, he's thinking about how if everything goes balls-up and there's no way home, he needs to get his team out of here. T switched snakes just last year, so he'll be okay for a while, but that just means they have maybe five years to get the hell out of Dodge before T's bun in the oven grows a set of megalomaniac teeth. When the egg timer dings, either they can get the T-man a new battery, or they shoot his tapeworm and then shoot him.

He's not sure the rest of them'd survive that. Or what the point'd be.

So he nods at the newest Cameron Mitchell as he steps into the room (not too friendly, not too cold), and indicates the coffee station. "Quarters're shit, but the coffee's good," he says. "Guess I don't gotta ask how you take it." He puts his cup under the spigot of the urn, careful not to give his back to either the room or the newcomer.

"I don't," Other Him says briefly. "Anise doesn't like it."

Cam's just about to ask what he's talking about when the guy's eyes flash.

"You're a snakehead!" He drops his cup, reaching for the weapon he isn't carrying by pure reflex. No matter how incompetent the pill-pushers here are, they _have_ to've seen the _naquadaah_ in the tox-screen--

"We are _Tok'ra_ ," Other Him says.

And he doesn't sound natural now. He's got the Voice, the same one Cam's heard from Ba'al and Ares and all the other snakes whose scalps he's hung on his belt. "Don't give me that shit. You're a snake." _He's_ a snake. There's a universe out there -- somewhere -- where one of those _things_ chewed through his spine, slid down his throat, took over his brain, his body, his life.

" _Tok'ra_ ," the thing insists again.

Oh yeah: _Tok'ra_. The Other White Meat. _Goa'uld_ Lite. The _good_ snakes, the snakes that strung Earth along for years, saying _tomorrow_ would always be a better time to strike a decisive blow against the _Goa'uld_ , and meanwhile -- despite all their promises of cooperation -- they fucking sold the Free Jaffa down the river, took Earth for all they were worth, didn't warn them Anubis was coming…

" _Tok'ra, Goa'uld,_ ain't no difference," Cam says. "Same snake, different day."

"We demand an apology," the thing says. Sounding like a man. That's how they fool you. _Flash_ go the eyes.

"You an' your goddamn tapeworm can wait till _Hell_ \--"

He doesn't get to finish the sentence. Probably don't matter anyway; he's pretty sure Snakehead Mitchell's gotten the idea. Snakehead tries to deliver a backhand slap, and yeah, yeah, it's strong and it's fast, but fucking Jesus: Cam works out with _Teal'c_ , and his big boy ain't been neutered the way some of these others have. So Snakehead pulls the slap (telegraphs it, too) and Cam takes it and wades right in.

Doubled fists to the side of the neck gets its attention, and a boot to the balls'll get _anybody's_ attention. It means the snake-half's occupied when Snakehead Mitchell lunges for him. When it hits out this time it's with a closed fist, full speed and full strength, but Cam knows just how _he_ likes to start a barroom brawl (that's the plus side of occupying the snake; means he just has to deal with the meat-puppet), so he's already rolling with the punch before it's even thrown. Snaps his head back anyway, and he's seeing stars and tasting blood, but he grabs the arm in front of his face and pulls, and manages a clumsy throw as he goes down.

It gets fucking _ugly_ after that, because he's heard Jackson say the _Tok'ra_ used to talk a lot of shit about being like Vulcans, all superior and detached even when they're kicking ass (haven't seen much of 'em out his way since the Lucians got the formula for the fucking symbiote poison: serves 'em right), but Snakehead Mitchell hasn't gotten that memo and it's out for blood. If Cam just had his kit, he could do the meat enough damage it'd distract the snake and let him beat the host into a coma. He doesn't. It's as much as he can do to keep Snakehead from getting to its feet again; they roll around the floor while Cam hopes for a lucky break that'll let him gouge out the thing's eye or crush its windpipe -- something really distracting.

The other hims grab both of them, hauling them apart. It takes four of them. He struggles just enough so they'll hold on tight. Snakehead breaks free easily. Cam knew it would. He brings both feet up and kicks it in the face as hard as he can. Snakehead staggers back and lands on its ass, and Cam and his bookends go down too. He's trying to get up, get free, because he hasn't finished Snakehead, and he's staked out like a tethered goat. He feels a pair of hands land on his leg and start to yank then get jerked away. When Cam gets hauled to his feet the next time, it's by a brace of Jaffa. They look like Teal'c, and they don't. At least the Snakehead's getting the same treatment.

"What in the world is going on here?" Another him. But this one is standing outside the doorway looking in (green BDUs and a baffled expression) and Cam thinks it's the one he saw in the Gate Room. The one who belongs here.

"Nothin'," he says, and spits blood on the floor. It's nice to see he fucked Snakehead over good; Snakehead shrugs loose from its Jaffa and prods its nose back into shape with two fingers, then wipes its bloody mouth with the back of its hand. It's too bad it'll be good as new in a few hours.

"Colonel Mitchell and I were having a small disagreement," the thing says in its snake voice. Then it looks back at him. "You think real hard, mister, about what you'd do if your choice was between spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair on Momma's porch or getting back in the game with someone like Anise riding shotgun. You'd do the same," it says. It sounds just like a man. The snakes can pass for human if they try hard enough.

He twitches with the effort of not going after it again and spits a second time, more calculatedly.

#

"And this is why we can't have nice things," Sam says.

It's forty minutes later and Cam knows one thing: if it's the last thing he does, he's busting them out of Bizarro SGC one way or the other before they have to measure him for the Giggle Tuxedo. Any sane CIC would have tossed him in gig. These morons took him back down to the Infirmary to pat his hand and coo over him and put a couple'a stitches in his busted lip and give him some ibuprofen before trotting him off to a Quiet Room on 25. Only it's a quiet room that's got coffee, sandwiches, two sets of bunks, and the rest of his team in it, so he doesn't really care if it's got a window in the door and SFs outside.

"What? You guys didn't behave yourselves?" he asks. He pats himself down because if he doesn't light up soon he's gonna fucking _kill_ somebody, only to find the fucking _Tok'ra_ asswipe pretty much turned his last six coffin-nails into loose tobacco. He shakes the cigarettes out onto the top of the table. Maybe he can salvage something.

"Sat in the corner and knitted," Sam assures him piously. She rubs the side of her face absently. There's a scar there; it goes from her cheekbone down along the edge of her jaw -- a little present from a guy named Anateo when he grabbed _Odyssey_ and they grabbed it back. The Lucians haven't tried that again: Area 51 hasn't come up with a bioweapon to take out _kassa_ yet, but when they brought _Odyssey_ home they shot weaponized symbiote poison through the Gate to a dozen Lucian strongholds at random -- it won't take out the Lucians themselves, but it'll sure fuck with the hired help.

Jackson sees what he's doing with the cigarettes and smirks. She digs around in her pockets and comes up with something that looks like a giant lipstick. She tosses it to him. He catches it one-handed and unscrews it. Inside are two pristine cigarettes (Jackson carries his brand). He's never sure whether she's trying to start smoking or trying to quit. "I'd kiss you, sweet thing," he says, "but I'd rather wait till the stitches come out."

"Yeah, fuck you too, flyboy," she says. "Before you ask, I didn't do anything either. Talked to some bitch I didn't know who said she was on SG-14 and wanted my fucking life story, so I told her I was the lost Anastasia and the rightful bearer of the sword Excalibur, and I was at the SGC working for freedom and self-determination for all peoples of the galaxy through universal literacy and free love. Then I went off to a holding pen where apparently in a statistically non-insignificant number of universes I have grown a _dick_ , drank shit coffee and ate stale fucking doughnuts, listened to idiots pool their ignorance, heard all about a bunch of evil light-bulbs and _far_ too much about my sex life, then Wimp Doormat Me came and brought me here." She puts the heels of her hands on the edge of the top bunk and dead-lifts herself up, then slings herself sideways onto it, rolling over onto her stomach to watch the rest of them.

Cam digs out his lighter while Jackson's bitching and fires up. T's moved to stand in front of the door, so at least the guards won't be able to see what he's doing. He sucks the smoke deep into his lungs. This reminds him weirdly of sneaking butts in the bathroom in school, in every place he wasn't supposed to on half-a-dozen posts. He'd always meant to quit. He'd never smoked in the house, especially after the kids came. He glances at T.

"Their questions were rude and importunate. I did not answer them. Nor was I permitted to come to your aid," Teal'c says.

"Maybe just as well." He power-smokes the first one down to the butt, flicking the ash onto the floor and grinding it to nothing with his boot. He polices the rest of it, flicking the evidence into his crumpled pack, and lights the second one. Best to get it while he can. _Live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse._ It's the new unofficial motto of the SGC.

He's most of the way through the second one when the SFs start trying to get in. Teal'c just leans against the door and pretends he can't hear them rattling the knob and then banging. Cam sucks down two final drags hard and fast enough that the nicotine makes his ears ring just a little (on the other hand, it's finally taking the edge off his goatfucking _headache_ ) and the second butt goes the way of the first. Teal'c moves away from the door and the SFs burst in.

"I'm sorry, sir, but you can't smoke in here," one of them says. His name-tag says _"Sanchez"_. He looks like Diego, too. But the Dee Sanchez Cam knows was the heavy man on SG-5, and they did a joint op with Five a year back for a rumor that Ba'al managed to get his hands on a Queen, and Dee got both legs blown off at the knee before they were a hundred yards through the Gate, because their informant hadn't told them the place was mined. He'd bled out before they could clear a safe path to him, and Cam took his tags and zatted the corpse out of existence so it wouldn't be back.

He wishes the dead would stay dead.

"I'm sorry," he says (although he isn't), and he lets them take the crumpled Old Gold pack and the broken cigs off the table. Not-Sanchez and his buddy (her tag says "Rooney" and her face isn't familiar; he wonders if they put her here because of Sam and Jackson, and wonders if they'd've let Rooney within a country mile of his girls if they'd been in the room when Sam was explaining to Anateo just how _very much_ she'd disagreed with his notions of proper playtime behavior on _Odyssey_ with Jackson sitting in the corner fondling her MG4 and offering helpful suggestions).

"Now I know you weren't really knitting," he tells Sam, once the door closes again. "So you want to tell me what the fucking fuck is going on here and what the fuck I'm supposed to do about it?"

Sam laces her fingers together and raises her hands above her head, stretching. It makes her tits ride up and out. He looks, of course. They all do. If they hadn't just _taken it up the ass_ from Bitch Goddess Gate, they'd be out of Debrief by now, out of the Mountain, probably home and liquored-up and _naked._

He remembers Colorado Springs from before a 200-square-mile chunk out of El Paso County became Colorado Military Administration Zone #1, and a lot of people bitch about living in a place that's an insane combination of a military base and (according to Jackson, with backup from General O'Neill) Soviet Russia. But it being a MilZone means T can live off-base (sure, he has to show ID at the checkpoints every couple of miles, but don't they all?), and nobody gives a boar's _tit_ if they all live together or if Jackson answers the front door naked and armed most of the time. They're in Cordon One, where pizza's delivered in an armored car and the MPs carry tranq rifles and Uzis.

He wishes to God he was back there now.

 _Stand up now. Fall down later._ Cam takes a deep breath. He leans back against the edge of the table and looks at Sam expectantly.

"'What' isn't our problem," Sam says, glancing from Jackson, to Teal'c, to him. "'What' is actually pretty easy. It's how the what happened, and how to reverse it. You see--"

He doesn't see, actually, because Sam's the Science Genius, but it seems like kissing cousin to the explanation he got from the him in black: subspace, tear, wormhole, black hole, hole in one. She finishes up with something Colonel Black didn't mention: all those interviews were for plotting their realities' point of divergence, because that's what'll let a big shiny brain like Sam's figure out the shape and size of the rip.

"They don't," Jackson says. "I mean, yeah. They do. Obviously. But not early enough to matter." She's got one leg bent at the knee waving it back and forth languidly, braced up on her elbows, gazing down at all of them.

"What about your dick?" Cam asks. He'd pay money to see that. He'd pay money to _watch_ that, Jackson going at it with herself.

She waves that aside. "Same things still happen, fuckstick. Langford, Project Giza, Jack, Abydos, Jack back (with Sam this time), Apophis, T, my brilliant career. All starting with the Gate getting dug up on the Giza Plateau in 1928 by a bunch of Nazis."

Sam makes a rude noise. Cam knows Jackson knows damned well it wasn't Nazis. He also knows Jackson's never gonna stop saying it, because the Giza dig was financed by Germany (which is how the Russians got the DHD; it was in Berlin when they took the city).

"So… ?" he says.

"About five years in," Jackson answers. "It's not like I _talked_ to them." She shrugs, and glances down toward Sam. "You remember we went off to, oh, I forget, it'd been Thanatos' old throneworld, and we got saddled with this boy scout cultural attaché?"

"I remember you threw up on my boots and the Kelownans wanted to try you for war crimes," Sam says, glaring at Jackson like she'd done it yesterday.

"His name was Jonas Quinn," Teal'c says.

"He was in with us," Jackson says. "In one of those realities, I died and he got my job. In a couple of others, apparently I died and … un-died. But pretty much from that point you can't be sure what you'll get."

And he's been fine (another him) or in the hospital for a week or a month or a year, or became a fucking _Tok'ra_. Cam nods slowly. "Getting home," he says. _Next on the agenda, guys._

Sam smiles at him, bright and lethal and merry and mad. Her dad turned into a snakehead; they don't talk about that and they try not to think about that; the only mercy is, he's probably dead now. Her brother called her as a traitor to the human race on _Inside Access_ right after Hayes got whacked and everybody was still blaming the Stargate Program for the Spring Surprise and when she goes outside the Third Cordon there's been … trouble.

"I'm pretty sure I can convince Colonel Carter I'm eager to help," Sam says slowly. "I am. Home sweet home. Who wouldn't want to go back?"

"Consider the alternative," Jackson says drily. She flips herself around into a sitting position and jumps down from the top bunk again. " _We_ love you, Samantha Eileen," She puts her arms around Sam and rests her head on Sam's shoulder. " _We_ don't want to see you put down like the rabid bitch you are."

Sam just laughs -- a nearly silent exhale -- and untangles herself from Jackson enough to put an arm around her too. " _I'm_ not the one who got sent to the Principal's Office for fighting with one of the other boys in class," she says, looking at him.

"Aw, _Mom,_ " Cam says, grinning at her. "He _pushed_ me." He walks across the room -- a couple of Advil are sure as hell not enough to take the edge off -- and kisses Sam carefully.

"Yum," she says, licking her lips. "Steak tartar with Betadine. My favorite."

"On Chulak this is considered a great delicacy," T says, deadpan.

"Get you some," Cam offers.

"Me," Jackson says (the woman has the social graces of a six-year-old and Cam don't give a rat's dead ass, because she also went about as crazy as she's ever going to years ago).

"Bite me and I'll break your jaw," Cam murmurs to her just before their mouths touch. Jackson always kisses in a way as makes you feel you've been fucking her for at least a year: lots of tongue and lips and teeth and body english and if she had tentacles she'd use them too. She's gentle enough this time (not even any teeth) that kissing her doesn't even hurt too much, but Cam thinks longingly of _home_ and the Jacuzzi. (His home. Their home. Because Jackson's apartment got blown to fuck in the Spring Surprise and Sam's house got bulldozed to make room for one of the Security Corridors a month later, so the three of them were already living in a rambling barn of a house the government bought up for pennies on the dollar while it was turning the Springs into a MilZone and sold to its war heroes at only a little markup. By the time they decided to keep him instead of encouraging him to follow his bliss with one of the other Teams, Cam was fucking sick of Transient Housing and Sam said they had room. He figured it'd just be for a couple months. Two years ago.)

By the time he's given Jackson a lick and a promise, Teal'c's ambled his way over, and kissing T isn't any kind of part-time sometime thing. And the nice thing about T (saved all their asses more than once) is the bun in his oven keeps the furnace jacked up; he runs about three-four degrees hotter than they do all the time. Cam runs his hands down Teal'c's bare arms, feeling hard muscle and smooth bare skin. T's the only one of them who doesn't have any scars.

"Yes," Teal'c says, breaking the kiss. "A _very_ traditional flavor on Chulak."

T reaches out an arm and drapes it around Sam's shoulders and Cam puts a hand on Jackson's hip and hell, maybe if somebody's watching it looks like a group hug. But all they want to do is _get the hell out of here._ Go home. Fuck. Maybe beat some people up and kill some other people. Get drunk. Fuck some more. Is that too much to ask?

Cam knows they can't stay here, even if they're wanted. Teal'c never was a regular Earth guy and Jackson went batshit a long time ago (he remembers the first time he met Jackson, and she said: _"You don't have to be crazy to work here, Mitchell, but it helps,"_ giggling bright and crazy like silver spiders dancing on glass, and it shocked him -- then -- that she was running around loose) and he's not sure about Sam (what it was happened, when it did, though he knows _something_ did). And that's okay, because you need to be crazy to do their jobs, and they are (and they do them), but while Cam knows he's crazy, he remembers normal, and he knows it maybe ain't true everywhere (he knows, looking at Fat Fuck and Colonel Green and all the rest, that 'maybe' is 'really') and if these people figure out too much about them, they'll want to _take care_ of them, and … well, he just can't let them. That's all.

So he takes a minute to breathe, leaning in to Teal'c, while Jackson kisses Sam with real enthusiasm. Jackson always fucks Sam in Spanish. Cam's never figured out why: Sam's languages are Russian, German, and the same polyglot mix of Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, and Farsi they'd all picked up in the Mid. (He's got Chinese, not enough German to brag on, and the same Mid-East Cafeteria Plan as Sam; he gets Russian out of Jackson when she don't care whether or not he understands _exactly what she's saying to him_. With Teal'c, Cam thinks it's _Goa'uld_ ; he's not sure what that says about Jackson and T's sex life.)

"You keep that up," Cam says after a minute, "Sam ain't gonna get a chance to go out there and convince these folks she can be helpful." He swats Jackson lightly on the ass and she grumbles semi-audibly and stops molesting Sam. "You sure you didn't get into any trouble, now?" he asks, because he'll believe Teal'c, and he knows Jackson is either going to lie or really not know, but Sam's a borderline case, and if there's been trouble once, there can be trouble twice.

"No _hitting,_ " Sam says, in a bet-hedging tone. "I might have been culturally-insensitive."

"Yeah, I think you better run that one down for the kids on the short bus," Cam says.

Sam sets her jaw. "Well, it turns out several of my doubles were on _Odyssey_ \-- same fucks, different reason -- and, okay, I overheard the conversation. So I just went over and told the one they were talking to -- she was _crying_ , for God's sake -- that she should get the fuck over herself and the only difference between rape and rough sex was that if it's rape you castrate the guy afterward and if it's rough sex you get his phone number."

Jackson yelps with laughter and Teal'c has his _'in my mind I am grinding your lowly planet into dust'_ eyebrow going. It's like laughing.

"Oh, baby, _baby,_ " Cam says, laughing and shaking his head, "I just _know_ that did not go over well."

Sam laughs back at him mockingly, beautiful as a drawn blade. "How the hell can they survive, Cam?"

"I do not know," Cam says lightly, leaning over to kiss her on the forehead. "But I _do_ know that you have to convince them that you, too, are a delicate sheltered flower who will scream and run if the bad men look at you funny."

Sam rolls her eyes, then clasps her hands in front of her and assumes an expression of vacuous idiocy. It nearly makes Cam clutch himself in reflex: Sam usually only looks that dumb and innocent when she's about to hurt somebody.

"Yes, o' my lord and master," she says. "You big strong man. Me weak helpless woman. You command. Me obey."

"'Meek'," Cam corrects, and gets the Sam Carter Death Eyes. "Helpless and _meek._ "

"Ri-i-i-i-ight," Sam says. "Meek."

They untangle themselves from each other as Sam saunters (meekly) toward the door. Jackson goes back onto the top bunk. Cam sits down on the bottom one (stifling a faint groan). Teal'c stands there … being Teal'c.

#

More proof they've been marooned on the Planet of the Bizarro Whack-Job SGC: when Sam taps on the door, _they open it._ When she asks if she can speak to Colonel Carter, _they ask her to wait here until they can get her an escort._ And they get her one. And off she goes. And then (if Cam didn't drink already he'd _start now_ ) Airman Rooney asks them if they have everything they need.

"We are fine," Teal'c rumbles at her, and Rooney don't seem to recognize the sound'a the Big Dog saying _get the fuck outta my yard_ , because she just nods and closes the door again.

When it clicks shut Jackson bounces down from the top bunk again (jittering with nervous energy -- Cam recognizes the symptoms -- another little background countdown-to Armageddon in his brain) and strips the blanket off it. She comes round to the door side of the bunk (they took the bunk farthest from the door automatically) and starts tucking the blanket in between the top bunk mattress and the springs to curtain off the bottom one. It falls across his knees.

"Jackson--" he says.

"You're suddenly modest," she snaps. "Drop 'em, Mitchell."

He pulls his knees up, rolling onto his back, up and around and over to get his feet on the floor on the other side, and that hurts like a motherfucker on account of everything's starting to stiffen up. When he bends over to get at his boots he feels everything pull across his shoulders back and stomach, and makes a little 'woofing' noise, and then T's down on his knees in front of him, unlacing his boots.

"Getting soft?" Jackson asks neutrally, and Cam takes a deep breath.

"Somewhere I'm a _Tok'ra,_ " he says.

There's about five seconds of silence. "Too bad," Jackson says. "Don't tell Sam."

"Because that's the first thing I came out with when I walked in here?" Cam snaps. It's bad enough the two of them know. It's bad enough _he_ knows.

Teal'c slips Cam's boots off, unlacing them wide and open and leaving them so if Cam needs to he can just jam his feet into them and run. Then Jackson curls her hands under Cam's elbows and hauls him to his feet, and Teal'c strips him out of his pants.

"Oh yeah," Jackson says, looking him up and down. "That's going to leave a mark."

Cam looks down. There's a red-purple knot on his thigh starting to darken. He winces.

"I shall provide therapeutic massage for your injuries in an attempt to mitigate the damage, Colonel Mitchell," Teal'c says, getting to his feet. A lot of times Cam can't tell the times Teal'c's laughing at him from the times he ain't. He's pretty sure about this time, though.

"Colonel needs his therapeutic cock sucked first," Jackson says briskly. "Or else he'll be too fucking tense."

"'Preciate the thought, guys," he says. "But you can't go knocking me out like that." They've double-teamed him before; he knows what happens.

"Hey," Jackson says, poking a finger into her mouth then reaching up to stick her gum onto the bedframe, "I'm still carrying the Specials. Said they were my allergy pills and they didn't even test them. You want to wake up later, two of those and some coffee."

Sometimes he thinks Jackson's psychic. Other times he's pretty sure she's just a damned lucky guesser. Jackson hasn't had allergies since Nirrti fucked over her DNA for her the year before Cam joined the circus, but it looks like that isn't true here, or she'd never've sold them that bill'a goods. (Times are, now and then, he wonders what else the snake didn't put back the way it was. If that's what drove Jackson crazy or if it was something else. O'Neill knows if anyone does -- probably the only one left who does -- and Cam knows he's never gonna know that particular thing, but when he got handed SG-1 he got handed Jackson too, because the tail went with the dog, because O'Neill wouldn't hand over the one to anybody who couldn't take care of the other, and he knows it's a sacred trust.)

And it'd be nice to go on arguing (on the off chance he might win), but there are times when he's in charge of SG-1 and times he's in charge of _shit_. "You just be sure'n save me some," he says, and she smirks at him. The Specials are wonderful little white pills -- Benzedrine, caffeine, and amphetamine -- because there's damned few times (once they go through the Gate) they can get their heads down for a nice six-hour nap. They all carry some (except Teal'c, 'cause he don't sleep _anyway_ ), but Cam and Sam had theirs in their tac-vests. (Jackson's a pack-rat who stores her gear everywhere _but_ her tac-vest.)

Jackson slides his boxers down to his ankles and pulls off her glasses and hands 'em off to Teal'c. Teal'c makes sure Cam don't hit his head on the edge of the top bunk while he's sitting back down again. He's got scratchy military issue blanket under his bare butt, and Jackson slides down to her knees in front of him and nuzzles her way between his thighs.

In the last two years they've fucked, in various combinations, in just about every place in the SGC but the Conference Room, the Gate Room, and the Commissary, including the General's office. Jackson and Sam in the men's showers (the week Menendez joined SG-4). Him and Teal'c in the gym (goddamned rough mission). Him and Sam and Jackson in her office (boredom). Sam and Teal'c in the elevators (lockdown). He knows it was (has to been) different before the Spring Surprise: now when you come to the SGC, you pretty much know you're only gonna leave feet first, and nobody gives a fuck what you do. (If your Team don't like it, they'll kill you. If another Team don't like it, they'll kill _all_ of you. They don't none of them break the bright particular rules the world outside the MilZone thinks they do.)

There's comfort in the familiar, in knowing T's watching the door, in feeling Jackson's thumb and forefinger settle lightly at the base of his cock, in feeling her slurp her way around the head and then suck it all the way down her throat. Cam breathes in slow and careful as he goes from half-hard to all the way there. Easy enough to get hard when you're spiking on adrenaline and testosterone; the real trick is being able to relax enough to come. Knowing Jackson knows all the tricks, that's a comfort too; she'll get him where he needs to go. Cam sighs out as the feeling in his cock goes from the edge of ticklish and too-sensitive to a warm pull and _wanting_.

Back in the day, he thought he'd come to the SGC to learn, to lead, to backstop, to babysit. Taking care of them but not needing that kind of care himself, and he'd been wrong. They held him up and held him together those first three months (when the file came from Skip, when the spiders grabbed Sam, when the endless procession of midnights and noons, summers and winters out of season made him walk out into the Colorado sunlight unable to remember his own name) and they let him do the same for them, and by then he understood what he couldn't explain, and he knew why no one had ever explained it to him either.

Jackson slides her free hand up under the hem of his tshirt, tracing the top of his hipbone and the edge of the knife-scar along his stomach. He's starting to think coming -- soon -- ain't outta the question by the time she's got her fingers nicely warmed up and slips that hand down to cradle his balls. (He breathes carefully through his open mouth on account of if they make enough noise, Not-Sanchez or Rooney's like to come back and ask them if they want Free Cable or a pizza or some other thing.) Jackson's mouth is hot and wet and perfect, and in his mind Cam hears the things Jackson says (or might say) when she's got her mouth free, and he thinks about fucking; he thinks about the first time Jackson fucked him.

And he gasps, shaking, whining in the back of his throat, and Jackson digs her thumbnail hard into the base of his cock, and sucks harder, and he reaches up, and grips the bedframe above him, and he closes his eyes, and he comes.

Once she's licked him clean Jackson straightens up and peels him out of his shirt and tshirt, then backs off. Cam flops down on his back on the mattress, feeling boneless and stupid, while Jackson stands in sight-line of the door and folds his clothes so he can grab them and get them on fast as possible (don't need to see what she's doing to know she's doing it). Teal'c straddles his knees and starts working on everything bruised on the front; after about five minutes, Jackson comes back with a folded blanket to cover up the parts of him Teal'c ain't workin' on. She zips back out into sight of the door briskly: she's the one on watch; the one supposed to make a great big noisy fuss the moment that door opens.

What Teal'c's doing fucking _hurts_. But T knows his business. Baby snakes heal Jaffa right up, but not straightaway, and back in the bad old days if a Jaffa wasn't ready to jump when some _Goa'uld_ said "frog", your basic _Goa'uld_ HMO plan was a staff-weapon blast in the gut.

He wishes to hell they still had Sam's medpack. With the stuff in there you could run five miles on a broken ankle and never feel a thing. Cam might as well wish for his M240 back right here and now. Or even his K-Bar. Snakehead Boy wouldn't'a got in quite so many licks if he'd had that.

Teal'c gets the knot on his thigh to loosen up a bit, and spends some time working on the other knots that are just _worry_. T's hands are warm. Not time to borrow trouble just yet. He wonders what Sam's finding out.

T taps him to roll over, and Cam does. Then those great big hands settle in on his shoulders, and Cam groans, because it hurts, and it feels so damned good. (At least T don't trouble to tell him he's _tense_. Yeah: no fucking shit.) T bears down on the muscle knots, beating the tension into submission, and Cam's starting to drift now, just a little (warm here in his little blanket fort), and he thinks he might even sleep. It's okay if he does. His team's got his six.

Warm here. It was cold in the bombed-out cellar…

#

Two months at the SGC and it felt like a lifetime, and he had _no fucking idea_ what he was doing half the time, but this took the cake with the cherry on top. The four of them gone undercover on a place called Tegalus to find out what they could about the Alliance selling arms. Dropped by ship, and supposed to be picked up the same way ten days later, only the op was goatfucked eggs to apples. The Alliance wasn't just selling arms on Tegalus: they were setting up shop. And -- oh yeah -- the Rand Protectorate and the Caledonians were at war.

Sam and Teal'c got off when _Odyssey_ made her flyby, but she had to fuck the fuck off before the Alliance patrol ships figured out why she was there and she couldn't wait for him and Jackson. Cam knew she'd be back if she could. Not something to bet the farm on.

The upside is the Alliance's took the "Ring of Avadan" (aka the Stargate) away from the Protectorate, and he and Jackson know where it is. To get off this godforsaken piece of shit rock all the two of them need to do is get there and kill the fucks between them and it.

The downside is Jackson blames him _personally_ for everything gone wrong since they set foot on Tegalus, from their cover getting blown, to not being able to raise the Caledonian insurrectionists, to being stuck here with him. She don't _fucking let up_ about it neither: the only time she _shuts the fuck up_ is when they're running, taking fire, or she's asleep (because he takes her Specials away from her once he realizes she's planning to stay awake until they get off this piece of shit rock, and that's when the love-feast _really_ starts).

And around about Day Five (one more fucked try at the goddamned whorefucking Gate, and this one got noticed, and if they draw enough attention security in-system's gonna clamp down tighter'n a nun's ass, and _Odyssey_ can't make a third pass even if she can make a second. Cam knows O'Neill won't abandon them, but that don't mean rescue'll come easy or quick, and a lot a'things can happen between here and there) he just fucking snaps.

They've gone to ground in one of the neighborhoods of Randopolis that's been bombed to shit by Caledonian ground-to-ground missiles. (Caledonia's guidance systems are ass, but their payloads are first-rate.) They've ditched the chase squad, so they've got a breathing space, and Jackson starts in again about his many failings. When Cam tells her she's an incompetent overrated cunt who's only lived this long because O'Neill spent most of his time saving her ass, she backhands him with all her strength.

And Cam hits her back.

Neither of them goes for any of the "kill or permanently maim" stuff they know (he wasn't ground forces before he got to the SGC but he's been in his share of bar fights, and he's getting the idea Jackson's pretty lethal), but anything up to and including beating each other unconscious seems to be on the table. He ought to have the advantage (height and weight and muscle), but Jackson fights crazy dirty. He gets her down on the floor of the cellar; she's writhing under him like something rabid and Cam can't decide whether he wants to rip her clothes off and _do her_ or grab one of the pieces of rubble, beat her brains out, and do her _then._ Then Jackson heaves up enough to get her teeth into the side of his neck and clamps down, and he thinks she's going to bite through and he'll bleed out. He rears back, trying to pull her off, and that's the opening she was looking for. She lets go instantly, slams him in the jaw with an elbow, gets away while he's still seeing stars.

He gets slowly to his feet. Panting, furious. Touches the side of his neck to see if she's broken the skin. Steps back toward the wall, because if he steps toward her he _will_ kill her, and he supposes that's a bad idea. He thinks about how _badly_ everything's gone -- knows they're going to die here -- his command, his decisions, his fault -- and there's nothing he can do about it--

She moves forward until she's standing just out of reach, staring at him.

"On your knees, Mitchell," she says.

There's no anger in her voice. No mockery, no contempt -- none of the things he's been hearing out of Jackson since he walked into the SGC. Nothing but command. And hearing it is like feeling a key turn in a lock inside his head. It's panic. And it's liberation. He slides slowly back to his knees again, still breathing fast and hard from the fight.

"What are your orders, ma'am?" he asks.

"I want you to use your mouth," she says, still in that even iron voice. "Don't stop until I say you can."

He feels his shoulders straighten without him telling them to, until he's kneeling spine straight, back straight, chin lifted with pride. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you ma'am."

She steps in close to him and places one foot between his legs and the other by his hip, then braces both hands against the wall over his head. He could attack her in half a dozen ways from this position. It doesn't occur to him. He unbuckles her belt, unbuttons her pants. They're loose; they slide down to her knees. He pulls the drawstring on her drawers and works the waistband open until they slide down too.

Jackson nudges her boot toe under his balls when he reaches for her hips. "You don't get to touch me," she says. "You don't get to touch yourself, either. Hands behind your back."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am," Cam says. He does as she says. It's awkward for him. He knows she means it to be. He leans in -- nuzzling, sucking, licking -- and she takes one hand down from the wall and threads her fingers through his hair. He keeps it short (they all keep their hair short) but it's still long enough for her to pull it if she tries. He takes it as encouragement.

This is the first time he's felt relaxed since he came to the SGC. It's crazy. But it feels like something's been released inside, like he's been carrying a heavy weight and he didn't even know, and someone else said they'd take it for a while. He feels the pressure of her boot pressing up against his balls and keeps himself from chasing after more. This is for her.

"You want to scream for me, don't you, Mitchell?" Jackson whispers, stroking his hair. "Want me to take you into the dark places and make you mine? No choices. No mercy. I want to do that. I want to make you-- Beg--" He hears her voice catch, hears her gasp. His nose and mouth are filled with the scent and taste of her: salt and musk and iron.

But she said he couldn't stop until she told him to, and so he doesn't.

She grinds her cunt against his face, and he feels warmth blooming in his chest _(marked and claimed)_. He wants what she can give him _(the illusion -- for a few brief hours -- of not having to being in control of fucking everything)_.

He wants her to beat him until he comes.

She pulls his hair, grinds herself against him, grinds her toe into his balls as she whispers filthy horrors for his ears alone (this is love, Cam realizes, and the thought makes him dizzy). When she comes again, she drags his head back and stares down into his face.

"All right. That's enough. On your feet you fucking piece of shit," she says. "Face the wall. Brace. And if I hear a single sound out of you I'll never touch you again."

He stares at her (he doesn't know if he's shocked, if he should be shocked, if he should beg, and if so, for what), and licks his lips, tasting her. Then he staggers (ungracefully) to his feet, and turns, and does as he's been ordered. The concrete of the wall is cold and rough beneath his hands.

Jackson lets him wait for a few seconds, and Cam feels alone in a way he never imagined before. Then she's there, pressing herself against his back, reaching around him to undo his belt, unbutton his fly, untie his drawers and push them down. His cock is rigid. Straining. Aching. She shoves her hand between her legs, slicking it in her own juices, then grabs his cock in one hand and his balls in the other.

"Fuck you up," she whispers in his ear. "Fuck you over, Mitchell. Make it hurt. Make you bleed…"

His breath hitches in his throat as he struggles not to make a sound (she's ordered him not to make a sound), and he feels her hand on his cock, and her breath against his face, and the warm weight of her pressed against his back as she rubs and pulls and strokes him. And he shudders, and gasps, and comes.

Jackson shakes her hand clean and wipes it dry on his pants. He hears her step away from him. "You can thank me now," she says.

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am," he says, his voice raw. Purified. He feels … cleansed. _Safe._

"Yeah," Jackson answers (meaning everything and nothing). "Yeah." Ordinary voice for ordinary time. He straightens up and looks toward the entrance, gauging the time as he puts himself back together. It's going to be better now. He knows it is. He'll take care of Jackson. Jackson will take care of him. They'll get through this. They'll find a way home.

"We get stopped by a street patrol on our way outta here you gonna have to come up with of explanation why my clothes're all fucked up," he says, and the sound of her laughter is calm and easy.

"They aren't the only thing I'm planning to fuck up."

#

Cam wakes to the sound of voices. Jackson's chattering, Teal'c's saying a few words, and Sam's here answering back, so he rolls over and looks at his watch (slept six hours straight through). Grabs his shorts, grabs his pants, drags on his t and his BDU shirt, and takes time to lace up his boots, because the rhythm of talk from the other side of the blanket tells him there's no hurry. He can still tell he's been in a fight, but it doesn't hurt so much now.

When he walks around the end of the bunk, Sam's eating a sandwich and drinking a cup of what's probably lukewarm coffee by now. She don't look really happy, but hey. Who is?

"Good news, bad news," Sam says when she sees him.

Cam walks over and gets a sandwich of his own. Turkey, roast beef, tuna, peanut butter and jelly … he wonders if they got this mix because it's what the SG-1 here'd like. He picks up a roast beef. Jackson hands him a cup of coffee. Black, two sugars. Almost cold. He sips it and sets it aside. "You can't tell me there's good news," he says.

Sam sighs and rubs her cheek. "Haven't killed anybody. The Program's still a secret here, in case you were wondering. And according to Bill Lee, we aren't looking at death in 48 to 72 hours -- it's his theory that we've all come here from alternate universes so similar to theirs that Temporal Entropic Cascade Failure won't occur." Sam shakes her head meaninglessly. "There might be something in that -- I know they've been testing to see if the Cascade energy was starting to build, and it hasn't been. Just as well, all things considered. I've had access to the full details on how we -- _all_ \-- got dumped here. None of us -- the alternate SG-1 teams, it's up to eighteen now -- came from the same offworld starting place. But they all exist here. And if you were travelling through normal space from each of them back here, your path would always intersect P3W-451."

"There is nothing there," Teal'c says, after a moment.

"And we managed to knock the singularity's grip on our Gate loose by dropping a nuclear device into the wormhole to make it jump to another Gate," Sam says, nodding (Cam finally catches up: P3W-451 equals Black Hole That Almost Ate Earth). "If an equivalent natural event -- supernova, gamma ray burst, doesn't matter -- took place at the exact instant the wormhole crossed the point in subspace where the singularity was, it could make the wormhole jump to the next nearest Gate." For just an instant, Sam looks frustrated. "You'll just have to trust me that for a lot of reasons involving string theory and the nature of gravitational singularities, the next nearest Gate was in the universe next door."

"And it's still open," Cam says slowly.

"It's open _everywhere at once,_ Cam," Sam snaps. "I heard General Blimp say they've refused to let over a hundred SG-1s come through. The singularity is spreading -- meaning more universes are being funneled into the interdimensional rip."

"And this is the good news?" Cam asks.

"When you know what causes it, you know how to stop it. Drop a big enough explosive charge into the singularity, and it'll disrupt the wormhole and seal the inter-dimensional rupture. That's what they're going to do."

"So then we--" he says, but Sam's shaking her head.

"When they seal it, we're stranded."

"That is _not_ acceptable!" Cam tosses the unfinished half of his sandwich back to the tray and begins to pace. "What about General O'Neill? He wouldn't let them do something like this."

"Dead here," Sam says.

"Explains why we're all getting sold the fuck down the fucking river," Jackson says, sneering, and picks up his abandoned coffee.

"Good news," Cam tells Sam firmly.

"The locals haven't left for the singularity yet. They don't see any reason for … the rest of us … to stop trying to solve our little problem," Sam tells him sourly.

"Nice of them," Jackson mutters.

"If no more Gatecrashers show up, they still got at least seventy-two castaways to deal with," Cam says. That's a lot of Xeroxes to sweep under the rug, even in Disneyworld.

"All of them will wish to return to their own realities," Teal'c says. "As we do."

"Yeah," Sam says, frowning. "That's the funny thing. I don't think the local girl would have figured it out -- at least not this fast. It was one of the--" she laughs, the way you do at something that just ain't funny "--one of the visiting team who told her."

Cam shakes his head. "So how come you're here stead'a askin' her real pretty how come she decided to fucking _maroon alla us_ , baby?"

"Dinnertime," Sam says in disgust. "They don't want us going up above 16, so they don't want us using the regular Commissary. They're going to feed us in one of the Special Function Rooms -- Landry's butt-boy came down and told his Carter. So I asked to come back here until they were ready for us."

"An' brighten my day," Cam says. Sam shrugs in a 'fuck you asshole' way. "Never mind," he says. With seventy-odd members of assorted SG-1s who just want to go the fuck home, Cam thinks he could probably just take over this SGC and hold it against all comers. Except for the fact half of them are pussies, some of them are snakeheads, and one of them contains a traitor bitch who's working against them.

And, of course, except for the fact Sam's got no idea what to do to make the science work to _get_ them home.

#

There's about twenty-five people already in the room down on 25 when their guards bring them in. They're the last ones; the serving carts are already going around. Seven teams (including them). Snakehead ain't one of them.

Cam just can't seem to lower his expectations far enough to encompass the sheer mind-numbing _stupidity_ of these people. In the first place, they let him and his team out for chow. In the second place, they're letting everyone get together by team. There's Teal'cs with _hair_ , Teal'cs without the _Goa'uld_ -mark, Teal'cs with a different mark. It's like a freaky kind of funhouse mirror. There's half a dozen Sams to choose from, including one with long hair and glasses, and one -- Cam has to look twice to be sure, even though he's already heard tell -- that's a guy, but still Sam. Samuel-Sam's on a team with a male Jackson, and Cam's intensely relieved to see the him on that team still has the family jewels, when he looks a couple of places down the table and sees…

It's bad enough he's a _Tok'ra._ Somewhere he's a _girl._

That team's wearing blue BDUs. Sam's normal, and so's Jackson, except her hair's long and both she and Sam have that kinda soft happy _civilian_ look. Only T's still a guy, and Cam never could'a imagined a soft cuddly Jaffa till he ended up here.

"Sir? If you'll come this way, sir?" Cam stopped to stare, so his team stopped with him, so their minders got fussy. He nods and moves on. The Girl Him -- Camille, maybe? -- looks up as they pass and smiles. Cam isn't sure whether to smile back or not. It'd be really weird to fuck himself.

On the other hand, she's got one hell of a rack.

#

Food's not bad. Drinks are along the wall, and the kitchen staff wheels in a couple of racks of desserts, self-serve. Pretty much like a number of officer's messes he's been in, except for the fact this one has guards on the doors. Cam watches the room (last in means his team's at the edge) and sees most of the Sams leave their own teams to clump together, and even the Jacksons seem to get along (it's funny; there's seven Jacksons in here, counting his -- five girls, two guys -- and none of the girls looks much alike).

Movement at the corner of his eye makes him look away from a long-haired blonde bubbly version of Jackson. The Girl Him is standing beside his table, a cup of coffee in her hand. "Mind if I join you?" she asks. "I saw you lookin' at me a little earlier. Jus' got here, an I think I'm feeling a little … outnumbered." She grins at him, inviting him to share the joke.

"Sure. Uh-- sure." The ancient ghost of sanity and grace surfaces, and he gets to his feet.

"Well, ain't you the sweetest thing?" she says (he's not sure whether to be fascinated or appalled at the fact that Girl Him has dimples). "Cameron Mitchell. Friends call me Cammie." She sits down. "An' that over there," she says, nodding to the blonde, "is, accordin' to Dani, my adopted sister. And she would sure as hell like to get home to her husband and kids."

"Jackson's married?" he says in disbelief. He glances toward Jackson, because blonde-bubbly-and-married may not be long for this world (Jackson's got a really low tolerance for anything she sees as a suggestion she oughtta embrace conventionality; Cam suspects she'd see Blonde'n'Bubbly's sheer _existence_ as that kind'a suggestion). She's nowhere in sight.

"It's a strange world we live in," Call-me-Cammie says gravely.

"Yeah, well it ain't _my_ fucking world and I don't fucking want to live here," Cam growls. "Ma'am." (And where the fucking hell is Jackson?) He flicks his eyes toward Sam; Sam takes inventory and comes up one Jackson short; she gets up and starts off to look.

"We've all got places we need to get back to, Colonel," Call-me-Cammie says quietly. "Some of us still fightin' the _Goa'uld_ , some of us fightin' the Ori, some of us tryin' to send the Wraith packin'." She smiles at him just a bit. "Some of us just tryin' to keep the Lucian Alliance from pickin' the carcass clean."

He locks eyes with her (enemy or ally or just another mirror-echo dead weight?) "I hear tell they ain't planning to let us do that," he says carefully.

"An' I don't guess you spend a lot of time waitin' around for people to _let_ you do things, Colonel," she says back.

"Guess you might call me 'Cam,' you got a mind to," he says, and she nods. He doesn't trust her (doesn't trust any of them), and he hasn't made up his mind yet what he plans to do, but he'll need allies. To cover their escape from the SGC. To help them take it over. To do some other thing he hasn't figured out yet.

"Well, Cam, I guess it might be a little early to turn our toes up and say we're screwed," she says. "If your team's anything like mine, you've pulled some damned unlikely saves outta your ass." She cocks her head, regarding him, and damned if he knows what she's looking for.

"Cammie, you won't believe -- this is a stupid side-trip, but -- that other me -- we really ought to have numbers, but I don't think anyone kept accurate track of the order we came in, you know? Because that would be useful. Taxonomically? He -- you remember we went to PR5-131 and it was deserted? His wasn't, so he can speak a variant of Ancient Phoenician -- I was right about the derivation of that culture; I win -- and he'll teach it to me and he's pretty sure and anyway-- Oh. Hi."

It takes Cam a leap of imagination (a leap of _faith_ ) to recognize the girl who comes skittering over to Colonel Cammie as any variation on Jackson. Blue BDUs, so he knows she belongs to the same set of action figures. Carrying maybe ten-fifteen pounds more than Jackson. Her hair's long enough to hang down in her eyes and curl along the nape of her neck. She waves her hands as she talks (he wonders if Jackson ever did), and when she finally seems to _notice_ she's interrupting the grownups, she stops and blinks at him. Cam stares back (stares at her for several seconds before he realizes what strikes him as even odder about he's seeing; her face is turned a bit away from him and he can see a line of refraction through her glasses; Colonel Cammie's sheepdog has a prescription lots stronger than Jackson's), and suddenly all he wants to do is take Jackson's soft little mirror image off somewhere and _beat the living fuck outta her_.

Yeah, even _he_ thinks that might be a little outside the box. A lot outside the box, actually. But Cam also knows Jackson (his) would be more'n happy to buy in on taking the Sheepdog to school. And he knows they'd both feel really good afterward. Sow the wind. Reap the _fucking apocalypse._ He's what his job has made him. And sometimes he--

"Dani, babydoll, you want to go an see if there's any cake left?" Colonel Cammie says. "I think I changed my mind about dessert. An you jus' ask that Daniel Jackson if he'd like to join us back at our table, you don't mind. Unless you think Sam's gonna pay up on your say-so."

"Yeah. No. Sure. Okay," Sheepdog Jackson says. She regards him with enough interest that Cam's pretty sure he could get her to go off with him (if Colonel Cammie wasn't right there), then turns around and scuttles away. Cam watches her go.

"Guess it's pretty bad where you're from," Cammie says softly.

"When the _Goa'uld_ invade civilized planets, first thing they do is make an example of major population centers," Cam says. He's not sure why he's telling her what he didn't tell Reynolds, except maybe when he was talking to Reynolds he didn't know how completely this universe intended to fuck his team over. "Anubis hit New York, Washington, London, Paris, Rome … about a dozen, two, others. Not hard enough to destroy any of 'em. Hard enough President Hayes took the Program public. We took out Anubis. Somebody took out Hayes."

"I'm sorry," Cammie says. She reaches out and covers his hand with hers. Normally Cam don't much care for being touched except by his team. And he purely hates empty expressions of sympathy from people who don't _know._

But he thinks somehow she _does_ know. (He thinks that's why she sent the little sheepdog away so fast.) He thinks about O'Neill, who's protecting Earth from them -- from all his Teams -- as much as he's protecting them from what Earth's become. He shakes his head tiredly. "Yeah, it's bad. And it's just a little fucking _difficult_ to recruit for a program when people know they're signing their family's death warrant if they join, so we sort of need to get back there."

Cammie nods. "I don't figure you should count us out yet," she says. "Or them either. SG-1 takes care of its own."

Cam thinks maybe that's true, but not the way she means it. He's pretty sure SG-1 (here) is gonna to cover its own ass at their expense; he thinks at least one of the Gatecrashers has its own agenda, and he wouldn't trust General Fat Fuck to lead anybody to any place but the nearest bar.

"Sure," he says. Sam (his) shows up about then, wearing her _I have no idea where Jackson is_ expression, and he gets to his feet. (T's seen it too, and stands as well.) "If you'll excuse me, ma'am?" he says. "Figure I'll get myself a piece of pie."

"An' I guess that's my cue to go hear all about Ancient Phoenician," Colonel Cammie says, standing up. Cam's a little surprised to find she's tall enough to look him square in the eye. "Pleasure to make your acquaintance."

"Charmed," Cam says drily, but when she holds out her hand, he shakes it. Her grip is firm and strong, not girly at all, and he feels a little better about being female somewhere else.

#

Jackson ain't anywhere in the room. She doesn't turn up again until they're all being herded out so the next shift can put on the feed bag (Sam's going back up to 19 to try to figure some way to get the trans-dimensional corridor to whistle 'Dixie'). Jackson's got an expression of angelic ignorance plastered across her face and Fat Fuck's butt-boy has her in tow. He explains (to Cam this time, in tones that indicate he's repeating himself) how they'd prefer everyone stays in the designated areas for the time being, and if there's anything they need, just tell one of the officers on duty and they'll do their best to accommodate them.

"Fucking four-star _prison_ ," Jackson says, once Cam's taken delivery.

They're back in the room they put him in right after his little chat with Reynolds. It's got Jacksons and Teal'cs and Mitchells all mixed in together this time, in every variation of the uniform of the day he can imagine: olive and blue and khaki and grey and black; camo in desert and jungle and arctic, tiger stripe in urban (them) and woodland and all terrain, blue jumpsuits, olive jumpsuits … seems to be some rule you can't have any repeats. There's even a set here in the gear Sam tagged "undercover rawhide". All the SG-1s that ran for home with trouble on their tails and wound up falling down the rabbit hole.

"You complainin' about the lack of beatin's again?" he asks.

"Breaks up the monotony," she says. "Think they'd let you go outside for a smoke?"

"Not funny," he tells her. She knows damned well he's out of cigs.

"Thing is," she says, ignoring him glaring at her, "the Russian team smokes -- you should know, you bum butts off them half the time. I figured it'd be a universal constant. I was right. You'll have to live with Marlboros though."

"You found SG-4 and stole their cigarettes?" Cam asks, walking them over to the nearest patch of wall. Teal'c follows, trading 'don't fuck with me' looks with the other Jaffa.

"Traded for 'em. Pretty sure they were clear on me not being the local girl."

From the look on her face, Cam's pretty sure Jackson's hoping they _do_ have her confused with the local girl. Ain't too likely. Too bad. "How many?" He leans against the wall. She settles beside him, thumping her shoulders down.

"Pack. I had more time, could've made it a carton."

"You're too good to me, baby."

She shrugs (irritable, distracted). "I want to get laid," she says, enunciating with the cut-crystal clarity of the well and truly pissed archaeologist. "I want to get drunk. If I can't get drunk and laid, I want everyone else to be as miserable as I am."

Cam thinks about telling her about the her that's married (with kids), but he doesn't want to spend the rest of tonight figuring out how to bust Jackson out of a cell. And probably that other team'd object to coming up one short.

Taking another look around the room, he realizes it's been set up as a rec room. Cards, chess sets, checkerboards, books.

And suddenly he decides he's as miserable as Jackson is.

#

They locals are scrambling to deal with all of them (Cam knows it). About the time the second shift's leaving dinner, Local Him shows up to make an announcement about the areas that're being opened up for their use (most of 24), and asking for their patience and cooperation. Someone (someone _else_ , though it's another him) asks where the smoking room is and Colonel Nice asks don't he know those things'll kill you (general laughter -- Jackson growls -- because they all know they ain't gonna let them topside any time soon), and Colonel Nice says they'll try to set something up down here.

Snakehead Boy comes in with the second shift (all healed up; too bad). It just stands to reason he don't have anything with him that looks like SG-1; Cam's not sure he wants to imagine a world where SG-1 is a _Tok'ra_ and three Jaffa. Snakehead Boy pretends he don't see Cam, and Cam looks right through him back.

"Looks like everybody doesn't have to check their weapons at the door," Jackson says under her breath. "T, didn't _That Bitch_ say anybody carrying a symbiote couldn't wear the Atoniek armbands?"

"She did, Danielle Jackson. However, Colonel Carter was able to wear one, despite having once been forced to host Jolinar of Malkshur. And as you are aware, the armbands cannot be removed once they have been donned."

"Until the wearer's body makes enough antibodies to destroy the interface virus. Only a Jaffa without a symbiote doesn't have an immune system, do they? So the armbands won't ever come off."

Teal'c inclines his head slightly. Jackson wins a toaster and her very own copy of the at-home game of _SGC Jeopardy._ Suddenly Cam connects a set of dots, and… 'That Bitch' is Anise-the- _Tok'ra_ , purveyor of fine Atoniek armbands and all-round Mad Scientist. Snakehead Boy said his tapeworm's name was Anise. Snakehead Boy's got Anise-the- _Tok'ra_ Mad Scientist stuck in his head. Revenge is sweet, even if Cam ain't the one taking it.

"C'mon, kids, let's go for a walk," he says.

#

They wander around Level 24 for a while, poking their noses into things (Cam isn't sure what he's looking for, but he thinks he'll know when he finds it). There's a lot of quickie signs run off on somebody's printer somewhere taped to doors. They say things like _"Men's BOQ"_ and _"Women's BOQ"_ and somebody's crossed out "Men's" and "Women's" and written in "SG-1". At least Cam isn't the only one who thinks Fat Fuck's a moron.

There's armed SFs in the corridors about every ten feet, and four of them on the elevators. Don't look that out-of-place to him, but (he's not the only one prowling the corridors) it looks like most of the Gatecrashers think it looks weird. The only weird thing from Cam's point of view is that the place looks just like home. This part of it, anyway.

Now that the first thrill of getting royally fucked-over has passed, and he's gotten the enchanting opportunity to discover the universe is settling in for a long slow screw, it's time to take inventory. Nineteen teams (Girl Him was the last one they let through; he wonders what her crisis was, but not quite enough to chase her down and ask on account of he's got the uneasy sense she saw him too clear, and he thinks he don't want her getting a look at Jackson at all). If you don't count spontaneous sex-change as a difference, there's maybe four teams here with a different membership than theirs. Five if you count the one where both he and O'Neill are on it. Call it a seven percent solution.

They come round the turn in the corridor and there's a woman standing in the exact middle of it all by herself. Desert camo, so she's not some lost local. Couple inches shorter'n Jackson; auburn hair clipped into an updo (so Cam's not quite sure whether she's military or civilian). Her back's to him, and at first Cam thinks she's just _unhappy_ (like so many of the SG-1s he's seen, that seem to spend their downtime sobbing in corners), then she swings round to face him, and the utter _fury_ radiating from her makes him breathe a sigh of relief. Finally. Somebody halfway sane.

So to speak.

"Somebody missed her morning muff-dive," Jackson says, just loud enough for him to hear.

"Shut the fuck up, sweetheart, Daddy's working," Cam says back, just as quiet. "Excuse me, ma'am," he says louder. "You look lost."

"We're all lost, Colonel Mitchell," the woman says, looking up at him. "And if General Landry doesn't do something, we're going to stay that way." Hazel eyes, and yeah, military; there's just something unmistakable about that flick-flick of the eyes, even though she isn't wearing insignia. Well, neither is he.

She looks past his shoulder, and her eyes widen a bit, like she's seeing a ghost walking. "Dani?" she says, in a kind of disbelieving way. "Teal'c?"

"Cam, this is Dr. Janet Fraiser. She's dead. Janet, this is Cameron Mitchell. SG-1." Jackson could be discussing the weather. A bad sign.

"I, ah… they told me I was, well, _dead_ , when they debriefed me," Dr. Fraiser says. She smiles a bit. "I guess it's pretty widespread."

"You're lucky," Jackson says flatly.

"I suppose I must be," Fraiser says cautiously. "At least they-- Cassie's okay here." The tone of her voice makes it half a question, and she's looking toward Jackson, and Jackson just turns around and walks away. The look on the doc's face makes it clear that ain't what she's expecting; Cam turns his head just enough to see Teal'c's followed Jackson.

"I have to keep telling myself that no matter what you-- What I--" The doc stops and pulls herself together with an effort. Cam gives her points for that.

"No matter what any of us look like, you don't know us," Cam says. "And nothin' in our world is anythin' you got to worry yourself about."

"That's comforting," Fraiser says. "But it isn't true. It's that kind of thinking that's letting General Landry seal the interdimensional gateway without any idea of how to get us back. I don't know what _you_ left behind, but my Earth has been targeted by the Ori. Hundreds of thousands of people have been infected with a plague for which we have _no_ cure! Humanity is on the edge of being wiped out. And I've found the cure, Colonel Mitchell. I've found it here. In another universe, SG-1 has already fought the plague and _won_. It won't be easy, but if I can just get home with what I know--"

"You're barkin' up the wrong man, ma'am," Cam says. "If I could make that fat-- If I could make that jackass back off and concentrate on _getting us out of here_ , I surely would. If you've got a notion as to how I'd do that, I'd be much obliged."

Fraiser makes a face. "I take it, then, that you support the idea of holding off sealing the rift until we can all get back where we came from?" she says, dry as bones.

"There is no place I'd rather be." _Than pinned down by half a battalion of fucking kill-crazed Jaffa and if I'd fucking known what we'd find when we got through the fucking goddamned Gate I'd'a picked fucking goddamned suicide instead._

Fraiser says she'll talk to General Landry in the morning and present the stranded teams' concerns. (Cam thinks it's probably best for her to be the warm-up act; he'd just break the asswipe's neck.) The CIC of the SGC back where she comes from is still General O'Neill, just like in reality, and Cam thought -- from the way Fraiser looked at Jackson -- maybe Jackson's dead where she comes from, but she says no (says "Dani's" around here somewhere, says she lives on Abydos with her family -- always has -- and commutes to the SGC). Cam's in her world too; joined their team about a year ago.

Don't matter what Fraiser says, Cam still thinks he's right. Nothing in any world not his is anything he's got to worry about. Less it involves some asshole who won't let him go _home._

After that he goes and finds Teal'c and Jackson, finds out from Teal'c (oh, joy) there's a second _Tok'ra_ here (in desert camo, so part of Fraiser-and-living-on-Abydos-Jackson's team, which means in addition to _being_ a _Tok'ra_ , it looks like he's decided to _work_ with one). Teal'c says it's Martouf/Lantash (also apparently dead), and Cam does _not_ make the joke about the Zombie SG-1, because then he'd have to explain why, and Jackson 's known to be a little touchy about Abydos when she's looking for an excuse to go off like the Fourth of July.

After that, since the Smoking Room hasn't turned up yet, he and the two of his opposite numbers who're also hooked on the devil weed organize a distraction among the rest of the castaways (really fucking easy when you're dealing with eighteen guys who're nearly fucking identical), and the three of them (and Jackson, who's restless) sneak into the access shaft and climb it to Level 16. Sixteen is SGC Security, and their palm-print'll override most of the protocols on the Base. If the locals lock out his (their) palm-print, they lock out the local boy, too. (Back home, it's manned 24/7/365. Here, not. Fuckwits.)

It's simple (after that) to fuck over the security cameras between 16 and 14 -- they're still live, but they aren't storing images now, so unless someone happens to be looking at the screen at the exact instant they're walking by them, they're fine -- take all the sensors off-grid in the storage closet on 14 they never managed to run cameras into, and shut down the vent system there. They can't use the elevators without their ID (which -- fuck you very much -- they weren't carrying offworld), but it's only another two levels of ladders.

A coffin nail never tasted so sweet.

"Oh, _man,_ " one of the other hims (khaki BDUs) says, laughing, "we are _so_ gonna get our asses handed to us for this."

It's dark in here (it's a fucking _supply closet_ ) except for the faint green glow of the safety light in its wire cage over the door. Khaki and Undercover are standing in the open space in front of the door (in plain sight if anybody decides to come along an open it), visible in the glow of the safety light, illuminated by the embers of their cigarettes whenever either of them takes a drag. Cam's toward the back, where he can disappear between the storage shelves and gain a few extra moments of invisibility. God alone knows where Jackson is, except Cam saw her walk in here with them. He leans back against a metric fuckton of copier paper, still on its slide. Even come the Apocalypse, the universe runs on paper. Reports, memos, _lettres de cachet_ …

"Yeah, what're they gonna do -- send us to bed without our supper?" Undercover Rawhide answers. "Oh! I know -- I know -- they'll _send us home for being bad, bad boys._ "

Cam just concentrates on filling up his lungs with toxic carcinogens, ignoring the other two.

"Hey. Mitchell," Khaki BDUs says. "What do _you_ think they'll do?"

"Same thing they're gonna do anyway," Cam says. "Strand us here and lock us the fuck up somewhere."

"Nah, nah, nah," Undercover Rawhide says. "We'll figure out some way around it. Right? Right? 'Cause … that's what SG-1 does. Am I right?"

Cam doesn't answer, and the other two start reminiscing. They talk about Christmasses they remember in a house Cam knows has burned to cinders, among family members who (in the real world) were murdered or have simply vanished. He thinks Ash and Ash's family are still alive, but he doesn't know. Searching for them (for his family) would be too painful and too dangerous. Cam stares into the darkness, refusing to hear the conversation going on across from him. He has a new family now. He concentrates on what _is_ (the lesson his new family taught him, the lesson that saved him): the cigarette in his fingers, the sweet soothing drag of smoke into his lungs, the small orange ember hanging in the darkness. These things are here, are real, and anything else is only ghosts and shadows. At least Khaki and Undercover keep their voices down, but their gleeful half-whispers give their conversation -- and them -- an uncomfortable kinship to kids camping out in the back yard, whispering after lights out. Cam wants to tell them what the real world's like, and knows he can't. Mustn't. He and his team're undercover here, pretending they come from the same kind of reality as Khaki and Undercover and Call-me-Cammie and Colonel Nice.

Until they don't have to. Or can't.

He lights another cigarette. The flame of his lighter dances. His hands are shaking.

"Well, I'm good," Undercover says. "You?"

"Figure that'll stave off the whim-whams for a while. They better either let us out of here or put in a smoking section soon," Khaki answers.

"Hell," Undercover answers. "Carolyn's been on me to quit since I started here. There. She's probably been after you too."

"Doc Brightman, but -- same song, different day. You coming, fella?" Khaki asks Cam.

"Just lit up," Cam answers. "Start the party without me."

The other two leave one at a time (morons or not, Cam guesses no one survives on SG-1 long enough to have ended up here without having basic survival skills).

"I thought they'd never leave," Jackson says -- faint breath of sound -- when the door closes behind the second one. Cam sees a dim shape in the darkness as Jackson moves to the door and stands beside it, listening, for two minutes (he knows it's two minutes because he times it -- out of vague curiosity -- by his watch).

"Either they're really fucking patient, or there's nobody out there," she says when she's moved back to his side.

"I'll vote for stupidity," Cam says, taking a deep drag and holding it down.

She taps him on the back of the wrist. Jackson doesn't smoke -- in the sense that she doesn't inhale -- but Cam passes over the cigarette without protest. She does whatever she does with them -- the tip flares bright as she sucks on it -- and hands it back. "Not stupid," she says. " _Alien._ We're being held prisoner by a bunch of fucking aliens, and I have no goddamned idea what they'll do next."

"That's 'cause they're sane fucking aliens, sweet thing, and you're crazy as a shithouse rat," Cam says.

"Paper in my file says I'm sane," Jackson says.

"Paper in mine says I'm an officer an' a gentleman," Cam answers.

"Always knew you weren't really an officer," Jackson says. "You want to fuck while we're here, or in one of the bunkrooms on 24? Some of them have twelve bunks."

"Yeah, I think we'll skip shocking the children tonight," Cam says, even though he can feel how much he wants to do it. T helped earlier, but that wasn't near enough, and Cam knows it. SG-1's been catcher for teams coming in hot, jumped up on Specials and adrenaline and a goatfuck mission, and he knows what it takes to get a team weapons-free and out of the Gate Room and through Medical without anybody getting hurt. He was there when Colonel Yueh (SG-2) called General O'Neill a fucking cunt bastard and took a swing at him in the Gate Room and all O'Neill did was duck because they'd all done their jobs and Yueh wasn't still running hot. And from the moment his team came through to the La-La Land SGC, they've been running on mission protocols, and Sam's got a play-toy to occupy her, and Teal'c's got more control than Cam can ever hope to match, but he and Jackson just aren't that damned lucky, and the go/no-go's gone on a little too long. Every additional hour makes him less capable of making the right calls.

"Here, then," Jackson says.

He takes a last drag on his cigarette, licks thumb and forefinger, crushes the ember out, tucks the butt into the pack, tucks the pack and lighter away. Jackson runs her fingers gently over his face, feeling for the stitches, for the heat of the bruises.

Then she slaps him. Hard.

It hurts worse'n usual -- his head rings with it, lightning flares down his spine, an he's suddenly hard enough to pound nails. Jackson muscles him back against the pallet of paper, her leg thrust between his thighs, shoving up against his balls. She drags his tshirt out of his pants, slides both hands under it, skates them up across his torso to his nipples. She digs her thumbnails in as she pulls and twists, and his entire body jerks uncontrollably with the pain.

_(It's pain he wants. Craves. Can't live without.)_

He pressed his hands flat against the paper behind him when she hit him. There are rules. But they come up now. (He wants to beg, he wants to plead: _stop. Do more._ ) She can't possibly see what he's doing in the dark, but somehow she knows: she doesn't move her hands, but she rises up on her toes -- leaning every ounce of weight she can manage on his crotch -- and sinks her teeth into his bicep. Even through two layers of fabric the bruising pinch of the bite is enough to make lights flare behind his eyes. He slaps his hands back against the boxes. At the sound she raises her head and strikes for his mouth. The kiss is painful.

He only realizes she's stopped twisting his nipples when she digs her fingers into his sides and starts rolling them under her thumbs so hard it's like she's trying to press them through his ribs. The bright pain of a moment before has been replaced with the hot radiating pain of bruising and friction _(warmth and openness spreading through his chest and down into his groin like that first hit of morphine, like the onrush of orgasm)_ , and he whines deep in his throat.

"Oh, you don't want me to stop," Jackson whispers. "You never want me to stop. Do you, my pretty little bitch?" She slides one hand gently, soothingly, down his stomach, and just as he's taking a deep breath -- thinking there's going to be a moment's respite -- she clamps the fingers of her other hand around his nipple and twists it again.

The sudden shock -- pain, pleasure, _pressure_ \-- makes him buck and groan. It's all he can do to keep his hands flat beside him, his feet on the floor. She's got her knee under his balls now, pressing up so hard he's arching away from it. He can feel his heart hammering hard enough to shake him.

Jackson leans in and licks his ear. "You don't get to come until I tell you that you can. Do you hear me?"

"Yes," Cam gasps. "Yes, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am."

"Good little bitch." She sucks on his earlobe wetly, and then bites it, nipping at it stingingly over and over. Flicking at his nipple with her thumbnail. Rocking her knee against his balls, and each time she slacks off he has to fight to keep from tipping disastrously over into coming. Every nerve in his body aches and throbs and sings.

He doesn't know -- can't remember -- whether he wants more of this or to get away; he's arched backward over the boxes of paper as far as he can get. It only makes it easier for her to work him. She's gotten his pants unbuckled and unbuttoned now. She slides her hand down into his boxers, and when her wrist grazes the head of his cock he sobs breathlessly. She closes her hand over his balls -- squeezing, pulling, rolling them in her fingers -- and at the same time pulls his tshirt up so she can get her mouth over one of his nipples. She sucks on them -- first one, then the other -- like she's trying to suck them off. His chest feels like it's on fire.

She's slid her other hand down over his ass, between his asscheeks, teasing and probing. His instinct is to push back toward the touch, but she's pulling his balls away from his body and the sensation now is in the borderland between discomfort and pain. If he jerks backward, it will be agony. So he doesn't move.

"You don't get to come, remember?" she says. "You don't get to move, either. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," he gasps desperately. "Thank you, ma'am."

She releases his balls and strokes her fingernails up the underside of his cock all the way to the head. The bright flare of _need_ , of terrible pleasure, makes him tremble, sucking air, desperate to obey. He chokes back the sounds that try to force themselves from his throat, unable to remember all the orders he's been given. Not to move. Not to come. But he can't remember if he was ordered to silence, as he so often is.

She does it again. Again. She's touching him all over; fingers pushing into him behind, nails sliding up over the straining length of cock in front. He's caught between (racked and claimed and drowning in sensation; so utterly possessed that there is nothing beyond this moment). "I wonder how long I could do this before you'd disobey me?" Jackson asks. Her nails catch beneath his cockhead and skate across the crown. He holds his breath, every muscle shuddering with his frantic attempt to _obey_ as she rubs her thumb through the drops of sticky wetness that ooze from the slit. His entire body is drawn tight, and everything that was pain a few moments before is only heat now; heat and ache and _need..._

"Please, oh please, oh please, ma'am, I can't--" he gasps.

Her hands stop moving instantly. "Do you want to come now?" she asks.

"Yes, yes I-- Please, ma'am, yes." His voice is shaking and he feels tears gather in his eyes; he's not sure he can stay on his feet much longer.

"Come for me," she growls, and tightens her hand on his cock, stroking and pulling. "I want you to come now. Come. Move for me. Come."

He wants to cry. He wants to scream. He bites his lip as release -- pain and pleasure, indistinguishable -- comes from everywhere at once -- surge and rush and torrent -- pounding through him, pumping him dry. When he finally drags in a full breath his knees give way, but she's there, arms under his, voice in his ear, saying _I've got you, I've got you,_ letting him slide gently to his knees, cradling him against her.

Cam lets himself grey out for a while; head on her shoulder, arms slack on his knees. Jackson's hand is warm on the back of his neck. Even among the Teams (the people who _know_ the only people you've really got to take care of you is your own), Jackson's got a rep for taking more than giving. But she's always there to catch him before he falls. The kind of care she's always offered (him, all of them) is the kind where she tells him life is nothing but pain and sorrow and dares him to face it anyway. The things that keep them (have kept them) alive are one long game of "Dare You."

Cam nuzzles the side of her neck, tasting salt and smelling woodsmoke, cigarette smoke, cordite. His head is clear now, and the calmness he feels is real, not the brutal self-control he forces on himself beyond the Gate. It's time to start planning in terms of exit scenarios. If he and his team aren't going home, they aren't walking into a cage, either. He considers and discards the idea of them inviting themselves along on the little "seal the interdimensional rift and fuck Cam's team up the ass" mission. Too complicated to be practical.

He's thinking again and it's time to move. Jackson knows it too; when he raises his head she moves her hand from his neck to his shoulder, then leans in to lick gently all around his mouth. "Bleeding," she breathes in his ear.

"I'll try'n bleed more quietly," he whispers back (every family has its in-jokes). She braces him while he gets to his feet. He tucks himself back together (new and familiar bruises) as he listens to her get to her feet. He runs a hand over his pants, checking for telltale stains. One or two (but the nice thing about camo is that it camouflages). Sure, people may figure he's been in here fucking Jackson, but hell. He can't imagine any version of himself _not_ fucking any version of Jackson. Or vice versa.

"Infirmary's on 21," Jackson says. "Let's go get a Band-Aid."

They make it out of the supply closet without getting' tagged, and most of the way to the Infirmary, too. Any other day of the week (in the real world) the Infirmary'd be one of the most high-traffic places on Base (easy to slip in without being noticed), but it's going on twelve hours now since General Fucktard sealed the Gate (no traffic in or out), so they're picked up just outside it. Wouldn't you know Reynolds is up here (probably cutting a nurse out of the pack to fuck)? He sees the two of them, and he _doesn't_ see their minders, and Cam watches his little pink brain tick over.

"They sent us up here," Jackson says innocently. "Sent Colonel Mitchell up," she amends (implying _and I trust you goatfuckers as far as I can throw a piano and I sure and to hell wasn't letting him come alone_ ) "because you know, two aspirin and a kind word just aren't going to cut it, and we're running out of ice from the Coke machines. But hey. You want to let us have our equipment back, we won't bother your doctors."

"They didn't send you by yourselves," Reynolds says (suspicious bastard).

"No," Cam says. (His turn.) "They said to wait. An' I done plenty of that since I got here, an' it's been a goddamned long day, an' I would like to get my head down instead of waiting around for the fucking Children's Crusade to find its ass with both hands." It's not the truth, but it's likely enough that Reynolds gestures 'this way' and he and Jackson head on in.

Infirmary's not empty. It never is. A few beds are filled, not only with locals, but with some of the Gatecrashers (coming in hot means coming in with bumps and bruises; his team was damned lucky). Dayshift's gone, swing-shift's on. All strangers. The swing-shift doctor pulls his chart; Cam glances at it (his temporary file's got a copy of the photo of him -- in his urban tiger camo -- and a code number after his name made up from a combination of point of origin -- P7R-14B -- and time of arrival -- it's how they tell between nineteen different "Colonel Cameron Mitchells").

Dr. Sudarkasa asks him how he tore the stitches loose. Cam says he doesn't know, just he noticed they were bleeding again. She injects his face with Novocaine, and takes them out, and puts them back in again. All the while Jackson's prowling around, picking things up, putting things down. Sudarkasa asks Cam why x-rays weren't taken the first time he came in here.

"Lady," Cam answers, "if you x-rayed every poor bastard any time some fucking _Tok'ra_ decided to slap him around, you'd never get any work done. We finished?"

She flinches back, shocked. Cam doesn't really give a flying fuck if he ain't living up to her mental image of Colonel Nice, or if they all kiss the snakes' slimy asses here. Ain't a whole lotta point playing nice with the other kids any more.

Dr. Sudarkasa hands him a couple of pills -- T3s -- and a little paper cup of water. Cam palms the pills and drinks the water. No matter how much you might think you need them now, you always need them more later. By then Reynolds has whistled them up a set of minders to take them back down to 24.

The SFs peel off once they've brought the two of them back to Coventry; Cam lets out a metaphorical breath. 24 is almost SF-free by now. At home he'd _know_ : here Cam can't decide whether it means General Fucktard trusts them all to be good children or he's come up with a decisive containment method Cam can't see.

"Rocked that bitch's world," Jackson says as soon as they're alone. "She'll go home tonight and fuck hubby stupid thinking about you and get off for the first time since she brushed the fucking rice out of her hair."

"I'm flattered, I think," Cam says dryly. He shakes the purloined pain-pills from his sleeve into his pocket. "What'd'ya get?"

"Scalpel, set of bandage scissors, roll of gauze, bottle of something." Jackson consults her pocket. "Antibiotic. No hypo, though. Reynolds was watching me."

"Good enough, baby," Cam says. "Scalpels always come in handy."

Jackson makes a rude noise. "Atoniek armbands come off when the wearer dies," she mentions, like she's discussing the weather. "Don't know if I could wear one a second time, but you've never worn one at all."

"Keep that in mind," he says. She'd have to be the one -- maybe her'n T -- to sucker one of the armband-wearing Jaffa off into a dark corner and do the deed. If it can be done. Might be worth it.

Things are settling out down here in the wildlife refuge as everybody accepts they're stuck here for the night. Their "hosts" seem to have the notion they should treat them like a bunch of marooned airline travelers; there's a cart in the hallway with sets of scrubs and little booties in their sizes, and the usual disposable dopp-kits (razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, mouthwash, shaving cream, cheap comb) that seem weirdly homelike, since in Cam's little world they all throw a few into their packs each time through the Gate, just in case they get a chance to clean up along the way. Jackson grabs six from one of the trolleys as they pass; they vanish into her pockets.

None of the Sams are here (all up on 19 trying to get them the fuck home before they're marooned here, and it's creepy as shit to think of his Sammy-girl as multiple six-packs when she's not even naked) and it looks like he's universally stayed out of the hard sciences (and so did Jackson, although God help you if you suggest whatever the fuck it is she does when she isn't shootin' people ain't science), because most of their bad Xeroxes're here. Mostly too wired to sleep. As he and she do their walkthrough they see a poker game here, a bull session there, some _kel'no'reem_ in the third place. The _dramatis personae_ for each group ain't quite what you'd think. _Tok'ra_ Boy is cozying up to the _kel'no'reem'ers_. One of Jackson's evil twins is sitting in on the poker game (the blonde mommy, and ain't that a kick in the head).

As they're heading down the corridor (looking for T, because he'll know the latest about where Sam is and what she's doing), Cam hears someone snap "Jackson!" and from the way Jackson gives him a sideways look, Cam guesses it must sound just like him. He can't hear it. You never know what your voice sounds like from the outside.

Another Jackson (male) comes barreling out of the side corridor, followed by another him. Neither of them is looking around; it's late, and just about everyone's settled somewhere for the night. (Cam pulls Jackson into a room, its door propped half-open by people tired of the constant openings and closings.) So there's no one the other two know of to see when the male Jackson turns back, his expression caught between indignation and something Cam would never expect to see on any Jackson's face. _(Fear. Loss.)_ And Cam (Mitchell; the other him) closes the gap between them and slams the guy Jackson back against the wall and kisses him, hard and hungry. Desperation and a promise.

Waiting in the shadows, Cam feels Jackson's hand slide carefully across his back and come to rest on his hip. And he feels a dull anger at all these fucking copies -- because the promise they get to make (lovers all untrue) is: _I'll keep you safe_ and not: _I'll kill you when the time comes._

#

Teal'c's called dibs on the back corner of one of the eight-bed bunkrooms. Cam tells Jackson to get her head down and she stubborns at him (knows it's a good idea, can't bring herself to agree, doesn't want to fight with him in enemy territory) until Teal'c says something to her. Ain't English by any road, and Cam's always trying to turn the _Goa'uld_ into German the first few seconds he hears it, until he gets his ear in and it shakes out in his brain and he realizes: nope, it's weird alien lingo time again. Probably just as well T can say things to Jackson he and Sam can't follow; she's more like to do them. Cam wonders sometimes why a man who commanded entire fucking _space fleets_ is satisfied to sergeant around a four-man commando team at the ass-end of the galaxy. Not even lead it. Cam's never asked. Doesn't think O'Neill ever did either.

Jackson don't signify she's listening, much less she agrees, but she reaches into her pocket and tosses Cam the little metal tube of Specials, then starts unbuttoning her shirt. Cam's pretty sure she's being careful because it's heavy, and he's right. On the duty roster, Sam's in charge of supply and provision, but Cam's learned Jackson'll steal anything that isn't nailed down. He takes the shirt when she takes it off, snags one of the bottles of water out of the pocket, takes one of the Specials. No matter how quick you swallow them, the bitter taste spikes on the tongue. He's learned to like it.

Jackson's pulling off her boots. She always does it standing, bending double to unlace them then standing on one foot to pull them off. T's already barefoot (on the theory, Cam guesses, he'd rather be sneaky) and now he pulls off his shirt. What's left of it, anyway. With the sleeves cut out like he does, it kind of looks more like gang colors than a uniform, and he don't wear nothing under it, since the man swelters in temperatures his good buddies the _Tau'ri_ consider barely comfy. He takes the bandanna from round his neck (had it tied around his head when they went through the Gate four days ago -- and when they _got here_ \-- to cover up his god-mark) and hands it to Jackson. She shakes it out carefully and starts refolding it into a pad.

Cam settles down to sit with his back to the wall. Teal'c pulls the mattress off the top bunk and puts it on the floor at Cam's feet. T lays down on it on his back. Jackson hands Cam her glasses, loosens her BDU pants, and settles herself down on top of Teal'c on her stomach. Nothing much out of the ordinary there, even offworld; Teal'c don't sleep and Jackson runs cold. Then Jackson pops the folded square of bandana into her mouth and bites down on it, and draws one knee up, cocking her hip to give Teal'c better access as he slides a hand down between her legs.

Her hands are on T's shoulders; T's free hand is cupping Jackson's ass in a meditative way. Her head is down, face tucked into T's neck. Not much to see, but Cam watches the flex of muscle in Jackson's hands and arms and neck as T works her. Totally silent, even when -- he knows -- she comes.

Room lights are off. The only light comes from the door to the corridor, still open, and people are walking in and out, deciding where they'll spend the night, talking in low voices. Some of the other Gatecrashers glance over in their direction, but none of them come over. Cam has his head down (giving a good imitation of somebody out on his feet, although the Special has his blood _singing_ ), and T and Jackson look like they're already out. It feels strange to be on watch without a weapon in his hands. He doesn't like it.

Jackson shifts restlessly, and T moves his free hand to the nape of her neck. Ain't finished with her yet. Cam palms himself absently, more for comfort than for release, since he isn't even hard, but watching T with Jackson makes him picture the idea of possibly fucking somebody sometime. Or being fucked. And he likes that. In his mind the daydream turns itself little by little into the idea of having General Fat Fuck bent backward over his office desk, using a blackjack to break his kneecaps to keep him in place and then really going to town. Cam's done the party trick of reaching into a guy's chest and ripping out his heart before, and he and Jackson have a long-standing argument about whether or not the guy actually sees his heart before he actually dies. He says yes. Jackson says no. They could always try again with Fat Fuck. That'd just be cool. Before that, though, Cam wants to hear him scream. Cry. Beg. And -- oh yeah -- there needs to be a lot of bleeding…

Jackson stiffens soundlessly against Teal'c's hands, every muscle tensed in opposition. After a long count of ten she settles back again, and T untangles them just enough to put both arms around her, holding her safe and warm as she relaxes enough to sleep. Seeing that makes Cam relax a little too. One more problem put on hold for a little while.

It's not the sex that's the important thing, because if the lot of them couldn't get through their days and nights without somebody throwing a fuck into them they'd all've been dead a long time ago. It's about finding something to hold onto when you're so overcranked the world around you blurs and you don't seem to be able to touch anything. It's about finding a way to step back from that -- just to catch your breath -- before you explode. Sometimes Cam wonders what Teal'c's life was like. Before. Not in all the ways of where he went and what he did when he was a First Prime (and even if the _Goa'uld_ were on top, they was fighting each other all the time on account of being snakes), but in the ways of needing to kick it back and remember who he was every now and then. Cam knows T had a wife and a son, but he didn't get either one until he was old enough to be Cam's granddad. Maybe before that, Teal'c's life was a lot like theirs is now.

Another hour. The corridor lights go down to third-shift levels. The other six bunks are filled with Gatecrashers anonymous in blue scrubs. One of them's a Teal'c (it's a symptom of everything currently wrong with Cam's life that he can think "a" Teal'c). Easy to tell from the real one: the other guy's got hair. It makes him look like a human dressed up like a Jaffa. T said the guy didn't have a tapeworm, and T should know. _Naquaadah_ makes snakes and baby snakes sit up and whistle "Dixie", and the _Goa'uld_ and the Jaffa (and the tapeworms) all have it in their blood. T won't talk to Cam about it, but Jackson will (asking how she knows is a quick ticket to a headache): she says you can tell what you're sensing by the strength of the pingback. _Goa'uld_ have the most _naquaadah_ , all the way on down the food chain to former hosts like Sam.

Around 0400 Cam takes a second Special. Two hours later the corridor lights come up, and Jackson starts to stir. It's the start of another beautiful day in Paradise.

Cam's not the only one who's pulled a white night, but everybody else ain't as quick off the blocks as the three of them. (O'Neill's said Jackson used to be downright drag-ass in the mornings, but she hasn't been long as Cam's known her.) The race may not go to the swift, but bathroom space does; they get washed up and teeth brushed before lines start forming. Cam contemplates not shaving, but decides to go ahead with it, at least today. After that, he herds Jackson into the dining room, because breakfast is probably gonna be shit and won't be on deck for at least another hour, but this is where the coffee is.

Sam's already here. A couple of 'em are, actually, but theirs is the only one sitting in the far corner by herself.

"Sam?" he asks. Quiet, sliding into a chair next to her. Teal'c settles in on the other side.

"They called in the Asgard," Sam says, sounding bone-weary. "The Asgard gave them a time dilation device that will let them get their Gatebuster to the center of the singularity in order to disrupt it. It arrived around midnight. The traitor bitch's been helping the local girl hook it up to the Gatebuster; the local girl's running the insertion calculations herself. They leave in a few hours."

"Huh," Jackson says, but not like she's really listening. She gets up and walks over to the coffee station and brings them back coffee (him and Sam anyway; T don't got much use for the stuff), then goes back for more. She don't come back to sit down with them again, though. She goes and sits down with a couple of the other Sams. Cam would like to take a moment to memorialize the fact that Jackson's sanity's jumped the tracks, but right now he needs to hold Sam together.

"Not over till the fat lady sings, baby," Cam says to Sam. "You know that. We been in worse scrapes. I give you enough time I bet you can bust us another rift. Or hell. We might even decide we like it here."

Sam blows him a raspberry and smacks him upside the back of the head. "I blow up _suns_ , Mitchell," she says. "You give me a--" she stops in the middle of the sentence like she's just thought of something, then frowns. "No. Shit. I feel like there's something I ought to be remembering. And I'm not."

"Take your time," Cam says easily (though he'd like to howl with pure frustration right about now). "I'm pretty sure not gettin' any sleep in the past two days might have a little to do with not bein' able to remember where you left your car keys."

"I always know we're in real trouble when you drag out that fucking cornpone charm, asshole," Sam grumbles, but he can tell her heart isn't in it.

"Ain't workin'?" he asks, pretending innocence.

"Something better," Sam says meaningfully. "I'm not cut out for a padded cell here in the Daycare Continuum."

Yeah, she can take that to the bank.

Jackson doesn't come back to sit with them when the servers wheel in the breakfast carts, and she doesn't join them for breakfast. She doesn't stay in any one place, though: Cam keeps an eye on her. She's moving from group to group around the tables, and she's _talking_ to people. Mostly her opposite numbers. It's partly 'cause he's keeping such a close eye on Jackson that Cam sees Janet Fraiser go over to one of the SFs on the door and leave with him.

Breakfast is shit (scrambled eggs -- cold -- rubbery toast and powdered juice, and Cam's pretty sure it ain't 'cause the Disney SGC can't afford to feed them, so it must have somethin' to do with wantin' to keep them a secret, and he can think of six reasons for that -- all bad -- without having to draw breath). And he don't know what Jackson's up to, but it's definitely _something_ , so he don't joggle her elbow, neither. Far as he can tell, she talks to all of the Jacksons she can catch, accent on the outliers: the boys, the Little Mother, Call-me-Cammie's vague sheepdog (who doesn't look like she could lace her own fucking boots, let alone stay alive beyond the Gate). Call-me-Cammie don't object, but she glances back at him looking thinky (god knows what Jackson's saying), but there ain't any yelling or hitting, so that's a plus.

Fraiser's back about forty minutes later (0815, Cam's on his third cuppa coffee, the stuff he thinks is good and Jackson says is shit, and he'd be a happy little bunny if there was some place he could light up without having to do some breaking-and-exiting, cause he's got a hunch it ain't gonna be as easy today). He doesn't need to be within spitting distance to know the doc didn't get the good word from General Fat Fuck. Blood calls to blood, and Cam doesn't know one damned thing about Doc Fraiser, but now as he's met her, he knows she for sure wasn't any damnyankee, and he knows what that chin-up quiet face means. (Pretty sure, too, if he had a for-sure way out of here for all of them, she'd help him and his team turf the General if he was all as was in their way.) He watches her head over to her team, and when he turns back, Sam and Teal'c are both watching him.

"You appear to have received unwelcome but not unexpected news, Colonel Mitchell," Teal'c comments.

"Yeah. I'm figuring Doc Fraiser's fireside chat with Fat Fuck did _not_ go well," Cam says.

"About what?" Sam asks blankly, and Cam just stares until T explains the doc was going to get them all a stay of execution.

"But… Cam, Martouf/Lantash is on her team. Last night -- we were all working on the calculations for various models -- Colonel Carter told it she wished she could delay their mission long enough for us to find a way to get home. It told her she had no choice but to do what was best. For _her_ world." She rubs the scar on her cheek absently.

"Well ain't _that_ a fuckin' kick in the balls?" Cam says quietly. "You wouldn't sell me out when my back was turned, would you, Sam?"

"Probably not," Sam says. "But then, I'm not a fucking _Tok'ra._ "

It takes about five minutes for the Jungle Telegraph to get to where the three of them are sitting. Logically, Jackson should be the bearer of bad tidings, but apparently she's too fucking busy to ruin their day, so Call-me-Cammie delivers the mail.

"Jan said she talked to you yesterday," Cammie says. She looks down, then glances up to meet his eyes. "I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell you how her talk with General Landry went."

"He said we could all fuck ourselves," Cam answers, and Cammie smiles just a bit.

"Well, he wrapped it up in clean linen. But he said his world was his priority. If we could figure out some way to help ourselves before his SG-1 closes the rift, well and good. But he doesn't really care as long as he gets things here up and running and can start sending his Teams out again."

"That's stupid," Sam says flatly. "Outbound Gate travel isn't compromised by the singularity. Shift SGC operations to the Alpha Site until we can solve this and go home. That's what it's _there_ for! I know there's one in this reality -- they're diverting people there _now!_ "

Colonel Cammie's enough different from him that Cam can read her (too hard with a face that looks like -- and unlike -- the one he shaves in the mirror). He puts a hand on Sam's thigh as Colonel Cammie shakes her head slightly. "Beg pardon, Colonel Carter, but -- do you have a General Landry where you come from?" she asks.

"General O'Neill's in charge of the SGC," Sam says, staring at Cammie with a mix of hostility and fascination.

"And General O'Neill might not make the same call," Cammie says. "But I've got some experience of General Landry, and this one doesn't seem to be much different. You might go to him and suggest he run the SGC out of the Alpha Site and have his team hold off their mission a while. I wouldn't, myself."

"Why?" Cam asks flatly.

"Not that I'm sayin' General Landry's this sort, Cam, but I'm sure you've had a run-in or two with the kind of CO who's just insecure enough he don't like to hear any ideas unless he can convince himself they're his. And _if_ this were that kind of situation, we'd be on minus minutes here. They'll be loading the warhead and the time-dilation device aboard _Prometheus_ in less than two hours."

"So we're screwed," Cam says.

"Not yet," Cammie answers, smiling like she ain't got a care in the world. "Thirty-six hours to P3W-451. A lot can happen."

Cam's trying to decide whether he believes Alt-Shift-Him about Landry and decides it don't matter. Bastard, saint, or asshole, the guy ain't gonna scrub his mission two hours before launch just to make them happy. The fact he went balls-to-the-wall ahead with it instead of making _getting them home_ the target for tonight says something. (Not something Cam particularly wants to fucking hear, but he's all the way past being surprised by that.)

"Her calculations could be off, the explosion might not be powerful enough, _Prometheus_ might be destroyed by the tidal stresses of the singularity…" Sam says, once Call-me-Cammie's gone off to talk to other Teams. "We can but hope."

"They lose a ship and their SG-1 and that's the upside?" Cam asks.

Sam shrugs. "It'd buy us time."

It might also buy the Gatecrashers the Giant Economy Size pack of trouble. One of O'Neill's favorite expressions is: _'It's not your fault, but it is your problem,'_ and Cam thinks they'll have even more problems than being fucking _marooned_ in the Land of Nice if the asshole incompetence of the home team gets their asses killed and a big chunk of the Starfleet destroyed.

The Armory's three floors down. It might as well be on the fucking Moon.

By 0835 the whole room knows they've been porked by the brass. Just about everybody's on their feet -- even Snakehead Boy and his three Jaffa wingmen. Snakehead Boy and Cam glare at each other across the room, and Cam thinks about making a deal with the Devil, cause Snakehead Boy and its Atoniek-powered commandos could get them to the Armory. They could get their gear back. He's carrying enough symbiote poison in his tac-vest to do in Snakehead Boy (a risk to carry it, even a tiny amount in a titanium case, and he wouldn't do it without Teal'c's consent every time), but beating Atoniek reflexes is the sticking point with that particular brainstorm. Might be worth letting Snakehead Boy live to get the fuck out of here. And no point starting something if he can't finish it. Once they move on the Armory, they need to be _out_ , and it's either up 27 floors and off to God Knows Where on Alien Earth, or through the Bitch Gate to meet up with the lightning-wielding ghost-Nazis. Either choice fucking sucks. Unfortunately, he's _Colonel_ Cameron Mitchell, so he gets to pick one or the other. If they were all easy choices, anybody could do his job.

His watch is ticking over to quarter of, and the room is heading toward open revolt, when Butt-Boy comes along to tell them General Landry "wishes to say a few words to them."

Two of the Special Purpose rooms at the far end of 24's been opened out into a space about the size of a basketball court. Floor 24's close enough to the Gate to be High Security, not in use for anything in particular on a daily basis. (Back home, if the Base goes to Lockdown -- or if the MilZone goes on High Alert -- it's one of the places the overflow of bunking all three shifts on-Base goes.) Right now there's a podium at one end, and a projection screen behind it.

He really wants a fucking cigarette, dammit.

There's some shifting and jostling as everyone sorts out into their own Teams again _(dance with the one what brung you)_ , and even accounting for variations, they're still missing most of the hard science people. Cam wonders if who backs up against the walls and who stands out in the middle of the room means anything. Jackson'd be the one to ask, but Jackson's still off being _fucking chatty._ She makes it back over to them just as Lardass Brass rolls his fat ass in (backed up by two SFs, Butt-Boy, Colonel Nice, and the local Teal'c).

"The ones in the black BDUs are right in front," Jackson says in a graveyard whisper, just as Fat Fuck taps his microphone to see if it's on and clears his throat importantly. Cam decides he looks like a big fat bullfrog, and thinks about gigging frogs.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Fat Fuck begins. "At ease. I understand that I'm unfamiliar to some of you, so allow me to formally introduce myself. I'm General Hank Landry, commander of Stargate Command."

Everyone's standing -- the space is just a touch too small to fit seventy-odd chairs, and Cam doesn't think they could find that many on short notice, even if they went floor-by-floor -- and there's a faint rustle at Fat Fuck's opening remarks. Whether its on account of they're _stupefying inane_ , or because people know the asshole back where they come from, Cam's not sure. Nobody really came to attention when he stepped up to the podium, so they don't exactly relax now. He slouches a bit more'n he was before, just to be helpful.

"I appreciate the difficult situation in which you find yourselves. As Stargate Command's flagship team -- in your own realities -- you're used to thinking of yourselves as vital to the defense and protection of Earth. And I appreciate your positions. But I know you are also aware that military service often entails great personal sacrifice--"

"I am _not_ military and I did _not_ sign up to sacrifice for _this place!_ "

Cam can't see who interrupts Fat Fuck; the voice is female but unfamiliar.

"And I am confident that no matter where SG-1 may exist, it upholds the proud and gallant tradition of service and sacrifice, military _and_ civilian, in the name of peace and freedom," Fat Fuck goes on, deciding that deafness is the better part of valor. "Now I am aware that some of you may have heard that we have discovered the means by which you were all brought here in the first place, and in just a few hours, SG-1 -- our SG-1, that is--"

It's supposed to be a joke. Nobody laughs.

"--will be leaving on a mission that will seal the gateway between universes, ending the threat to our reality forever."

"Fucktard," Jackson murmurs. "We're supposed to care?"

"Quiet," Cam says, and Jackson kicks him.

"In the meantime, we will naturally continue to search for a means to return you to your own realities. But in the event that doing so proves to be impossible, you may rest assured that you will be allowed to continue your work for Stargate Command here. We face an enemy just as deadly, just as implacable, just as merciless, as any that you have faced in your own realities. You can be certain that, should you remain here, you will be able to make a valuable contribution to the survival of the human race."

"Apparently his reality is the only reality of consequence," Teal'c rumbles quietly.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say he set this up himself to get fresh cannon fodder," Sam says thoughtfully.

"For now, I ask for your patience and your cooperation. It's too soon to give up hope of a positive solution to your problem. And who knows? You might find you like it here. From what I've heard, this place is an improvement over the places some of you have left."

Cam supposes it's another joke. It goes over as well as the first one did.

"That's all for the moment. Major Simmons will provide you with informational updates. Dismissed."

"Next time use more lube," Cam says, as Fat Fuck leaves the rostrum. It's probably not loud enough to be heard -- he's at the back of the room -- but the team in front of him looks back to exchange "we've just been fucked with a cheese grater" looks.

#

The rest of the day is a series of things that ought to hurt or ought to mean something, and Cam can't sort them out because he hasn't made up his mind what to do (reactive strategy sucks razors).

The wonks from 19 come down and rig one of the (former) bunkrooms with a metric shitton of ionizers and air-scrubbers and precipitators. Instant smoking room. The rest of them grab about a dozen chairs and some of the cups from the coffee station, because of course ain't no ashtrays down here. It's a little weird to watch the smoke drift off the end of the cigarette and then pool down toward the floor (like ink dropped into water) before it gets sucked up into the scrubbers. They pick up about a dozen more smokers, too (since being _fucked over and sold south_ is just the thing to make you either take up smoking or be sorry you quit). The Russians find the place, too, and the Russians don't give a rat's ass whether or not the rest of them are supposed to be in isolation: they've found a place they can smoke _inside the SGC_ and the Americanski General can go fuck himself.

Cam smokes his way through his entire pack of Marlboros, until his throat is scratchy and his chest is tight. _Prometheus_ left around 1015. He sets his stopwatch to count down the hours and minutes until the door shuts on their only retreat. Sam's off trying to unscrew the inscrutable. He hopes she (times however-many) can.

Lunch is sandwiches. Jackson shows up for that. She's gotten more gum from somewhere, and slips him four packs of cigarettes under the table. Old Golds this time.

"Something you want to share with the rest of the class?" he asks her, because Jackson's looking thoughtful, and that's never a good sign.

"Not yet," she says. "The guys in black went with them. On the ship."

Cam looks at Teal'c. T looks baffled, so wherever Jackson's been all morning, it wasn't with him. "They took a set of … us … with them?" he asks. "On _Prometheus_?"

"Not us," Jackson says. "Them."

Which might make great sense to Jackson, but Cam's not getting a lot out of it. She doesn't bother with lunch, either. Just a couple of cups of coffee and off she goes again.

So since Cam doesn't have anything better to do, he spends the afternoon hunting.

 _'The guys in black went with them. On the ship.'_ First he goes looking for Colonel Black and his merrie band. Doesn't find them, but they might have changed out of their Covert Ops jammies. So he does a head-count. Seventeen Cam Mitchells (not counting him) and one Cammie Mitchell is their current roster, and they should all be on 24. He can't go by Sams, since they're not all here, and he can't go by Jacksons, since she isn't with every team. Neither is T. But _he_ is, one way or another. It takes him three and a half hours (to be sure of the count, and to do it without anyone knowing he's counting), and he comes up one Cam Mitchell short. He doesn't see anyone wearing black BDUs anywhere either.

So.

The local talent took a set of the Gatecrashers with them, on the mission to maroon them all here. And not just any set: the first set that came through. The set whose Sam gave them the key to the whole puzzle. Oh, there is something so fucking wrong here. Sam said maybe Landry was recruiting cannon fodder, and Cam knows she was making a joke (a black joke, like all their jokes), but it occurs to him (part of him, he realizes, has been thinking this all along) that the "Black" Team has been shoving things around the way they wanted them to go from the git-go. And now they're off on a pleasure cruise with the locals. And who'd really know the difference if they swapped uniforms and shoved the local talent out the airlock?

He's wondering who to mention this to (the man he really wants to tell is a universe away) and pacing the corridor with Teal'c at his elbow (eight circuits of the whole floor is a mile) when the elevator doors open and Sam and Jackson pop out with their SF dream-dates. And Sam looks indignant, and Jackson looks pleased, and Jackson looking pleased is always (always) a really bad sign for somebody. So he heads on over to them, and Sam says airily that she wanted to take a break and stretch her legs, and they poke around 24 until they find a nice _closet_ where all four of them can stretch their legs together.

"Tell him what you told me," Sam says, the moment the door's shut.

"Bill Lee is a fucktard," Jackson says agreeably.

There's the sound of a scuffle in the dark. "Hey," Cam says warningly.

"Bill Lee thinks none of us is suffering from Entropic Cascade Failure because our universes of origin are nearly identical to this one," Jackson says. "He's wrong."

"About which part?" Cam asks. "Because we ain't none of us been here more'n --what? Twenty-four hours?"

"Yes," Sam says. "And the first overt symptoms don't show up for forty-eight hours. But there's an energy-signature that's immediately measurable. None of us showed any signs of it, either yesterday or today. But--"

"But I've spent the last eight hours doing a much more comprehensive set of interviews than these fucking asshole morons ever could. If our universes of origin are _'nearly identical'_ , I'll fuck General Fatboy on the Gate Room ramp," Jackson says.

"Sweet thing, you'd fuck anybody anywhere," Cam says, and Jackson gives one sharp bark of laughter. "So if they aren't identical, there's another reason we aren't exploding, right?"

"Don't worry," Sam says. "We will. The reason none of us has experienced any symptoms of Entropic Cascade Failure so far is because the inter-dimensional rift is open. While it is, we're still -- in a manner of speaking -- in our own universes. It’s the simple distinction between a Schwarzschild wormhole -- the kind the Stargate uses -- and a Minkowski wormhole -- which opens a portal between two universes. In this case, it's more of a modified Minkowski Bridge capable of opening between an infinite number of universes at the same time, and while it's open, these multiple points of interdimensional spacetime are connected."

"I love how you say 'simple'," Cam drawls. "It's pretty much all I understood out of that."

Sam laughs without humor. "Try this: the moment they seal the singularity, the Entropic Cascade Clock starts ticking, and forty-eight hours after _that_ , we all go into Cascade Failure, regardless of _when_ we arrived in this universe."

He'll say this for Sam: she likes her science, but she's perfectly capable of cutting to the chase and bottom-lining things for him. "Sucks to be us," Cam says.

"Sucks even more to be this SGC," Sam says. "Because Entropic Cascade Failure releases a measurable amount of energy, and while I've never had a chance to observe a catastrophic failure event, I theorize that a catastrophic failure event will release significantly more."

Okay, now they're back to the science. But now it's _his_ kind of science. Things that go boom. "And six dozen of 'em in the same place?" Cam asks.

"Should not only release exponentially more quantum energy than a single catastrophic failure event, but the proximity of the energy sources to one another will probably hasten the liberation of stored energy. In other words: it will happen faster and burn brighter," Sam says.

"Boom," Jackson says, and giggles, bright and happy.

"Anybody else gonna figure this out, Sam?" Cam asks.

She makes a rude noise. "The only one who could would be … me. And _I_ am too busy trying to figure out how to make a Minkowski wormhole reverse itself to an infinite number of destinations without redialing a DHD that wasn't involved in the first place. And none of them has Dani's data on nineteen alternate universes to theorize from."

"Seventeen," Jackson says. "The locals don't count for my purposes, we're my baseline, and I couldn't get the Black Team to talk to me before they left."

Cam waves that aside, even though they can't see him in the dark. "And they went with the locals on _Prometheus_ ," he says. It don't make any kind of sense at all.

"I told you that at lunch," Jackson says in her _'Cam is a moron'_ voice.

"That's not all," Sam says, and she's gone from 'thoughtful and pleased' to 'suspicious and irritable now. "They're the only crew. Them and the local SG-1."

"And you know this how?" Cam asks.

"I figured that no matter what the pippy-poo cunt with the big tits said, it wouldn't hurt to go talk to that fat ass, especially considering his stirring inspirational speech. How much did I have to lose? Okay, so I was waiting outside his office--"

"--eavesdropping--" Cam says.

"--just standing there innocently," Sam says, " _with_ my escort, and I _happened_ to look through the Plexiglass and _happened_ to see General Blimp talking to your opposite number. So I went over to get some coffee, and it was perfectly easy to see what they were saying. Your opposite number volunteered himself and his team for the very dangerous mission -- so heroic of you, Cam, I was touched -- and said it wouldn't be fair to _Prometheus's_ crew to send them into harm's way. Had the old goat eating right out of his hand. So I remembered something I had to get in the lab, and left."

"Good girl," Cam says. He thinks for almost a minute. "Why would a version of us go to an alternate universe, suck in a bunch of other versions of us to the same place, and then make sure we couldn't get home again?"

"Perhaps they wish to build an army," Teal'c suggests. "It is unclear what their ultimate objective might be, however."

"Ruling the galaxy?" Jackson suggests. "Have to knock off these Ori first, though."

"And a bunch of copies of _us_ are not what I'd pick to build an army out of," Sam says. "Not if I ever wanted to sleep again, anyway."

"Not everybody has your utter and charming lack of morals, sweetheart," Cam says graciously. "Next: we gonna tell 'em the moment they seal the singularity, Cheyenne Mountain becomes Cheyenne Crater?"

There's a beat of silence. And then even Teal'c laughs.

#

Leaving the closet, Cam realizes he's made his call. No break for the Bitch Gate, and none for the surface, either. Either one'd be running. SG-1 doesn't run. Tactical retreat ain't the same thing at all, and there's only one line of retreat open. People who'll sell out the universe times nineteen for their own convenience don't deserve the cool toys anyway.

Of course, other folks don't have his advantages.

Sam goes back down to the lab after their little chat. Nobody's supervising the multiple hers (asswipes), and Entropic Cascade Failure is close enough to what she'd be looking at anyway that nobody'd turn a hair even if they _was_ looking. With a timeframe for _Prometheus_ dropping her payload, his sweet Sam wants to look into ways to put some sugar on their local version of the Spring Surprise. (Cam's thinking timing, jumping the SFs, and a few good lies to get all of 'em down to the Gate Room, because a little _naquaadah_ always makes things merrier when you're talking explosions.)

But ain't even an hour before she's back, and not just her, but her and five of the other ones. And they don't just have an SF guard, but a couple of SG Teams riding shotgun. It's just luck Cam's watching the elevator, because he isn't let to get close. The Teams draw down on him and the other Gatecrashers while the Sams get herded off to the Special Purpose room where they all got that stirring inspirational speech this morning. Cam locks eyes with Sam and she shakes her head. She has no fucking clue what's going down.

All of a sudden the ground-rules have changed. Everyone here can tell.

Six at this elevator, but there's sixteen stranded astrophysicists here. Cam leaves T on watch here and runs like hell to the elevator at the other end of the floor. Two local SG Teams in the corridor here too (no sign of any Sams); he grabs the nearest Mitchell and gets a head-count. Five came down on this side: three more girl-Sams, the boy-Sam, and the _Tok'ra_ traitor from Doc Fraiser's team. Five and six is eleven. At this bright particular moment there's eighteen SG-1s stranded here, and _Tok'ra_ -Him's team doesn't have a Sam, and Doc Fraiser's team has the Traitor _Tok'ra_ instead (a snake is a snake is a snake), and eighteen minus two is sixteen and sixteen isn't eleven and there's no way to make it into eleven, and that leads right into Act Two.

Act Two's pretty entertaining, specially since Cam's already made up his mind about what he means to do with his future. It looks like Fat Fuck wants to herd the lot of them back into the Special Purpose room, and (in Cam's educated opinion, fuck you very much) the rest of the Gatecrashers might be a bunch of limp-wristed spineless pansies, but they're still limp-wristed spineless _SG-1_ pansies, and Fat Fuck's managed to piss off even the charter members of the Getalong Gang among them. This morning it took them about fifteen minutes to congregate themselves into Special Purpose 24 West A/B.

This afternoon, it takes Stargate Command ninety minutes to get them (most of them) in there, and that only for the fact that none of them's putting up serious -- in the sense of _intending to hand anybody their ass as a hat_ \-- resistance. But you don't shove a Jaffa around (even if he's been to the vet), and you don't blow off a CO who wants to know what the Jesus fuck on toast you're doing with his people. As for Jackson … apparently she's a mean little fuck no matter what universe she's in, because she (one of the other ones: not his) starts out by lecturing one of the SFs who's trying to get her to _fucking move her ass, honey_ (although not in so many words, more's the pity), and then she grabs his rifle away from him. Cam guesses the guy must be pretty on edge by that point, since he grabs it back and clubs her in the side of the head with it, and after that everything pretty much goes completely to shit.

It may scoop the pot for the most surreal riot Cam's been involved in. He takes the opportunity to put a hurt on a couple of SFs just for fun and do a little shopping on the off chance he won't be searched, but mostly he stays on the edges. T's leaning against the wall giving everyone the Jaffa Death Smirk, he doesn't see Jackson, and Sam's restricting herself to booting a few helpless bastards in the nuts. (Because sure, most of the Xerox-Sams are wimps, but his baby girl isn't, and once the noise-level hit "panic" out here, the SFs keeping them all penned up in the OK Corral got a little too distracted.)

It's too fucking bad Reynolds and another Team (their patches say "3" and "5", and they're six-man teams, so Cam's guessing they're the Marine units) shows up before the revolution really gets going. They're packing zats and _intars_ , and they don't give a flying fuck whether they drop friendlies or Gatecrashers.

Since Cam, Sam, and Teal'c are still standing, they get to be helpful and drag all the unconscious and semi-conscious Gatecrashers down to Special Purpose 24 West A/B. Fraiser's still on her feet, and when Reynolds refuses to let her have medical equipment to treat the casualties, Cam's pretty sure Reynolds ain't long for this life (man ain't long for it anyway, but it gives Cam a warm feeling to see somebody else is as pissed off as he is). Even Cammie Mitchell looks pissed-off, and her little sheepdog actually looks _awake._

More Gatecrashers come trickling in (at gunpoint) over the next half hour. Jackson's one of the last. Carried in unconscious and missing her uniform shirt and her glasses, and the two guys carrying her drop her on the floor and one of them has a word with Reynolds, who beckons Cam and his team over.

"I'd like to lodge a protest," Cam says, looking down at Jackson.

"Take it up with Sergeant Alvarez," Reynolds says. "He's in the Infirmary. Here's the deal, Colonel. You submit to a search, or we zat you and do it afterward."

"And here I thought we had a real connection," Sam says to Reynolds, deadpan. "Something almost spiritual."

"Yes, ma'am," Reynolds says. "You're next."

Cam makes a big show of handing his cigarettes and lighter over to Teal'c before standing ostentatiously still, arms out from his sides. Of course the search finds the pistol and the keycard (keycards) but hey. Can't blame a boy for trying.

"What's this?" the sergeant asks suspiciously, holding up the silver screw-top tube.

Cam thinks of telling the asswipe it's a grenade, but he wants to keep it. "Jackson's allergy meds. Check your fucking paperwork, genius. She had them in the Infirmary when we came in. An' if y'all gave us fucking _footlockers_ for our gear, I wouldn't have to carry them around." He grabs them back and drops the tube of Specials back into his pocket.

"He's clean, sir," the sergeant says. (Cam tsks mentally; with his own armory to gear up in, he could've weathered that search and still be carrying enough mayhem to take out most of this room.) He steps back to stand with Teal'c and Sam. The amount of ordinance trained on them is kind of heartwarming.

"If you please, ma'am?" Reynolds says to Sam (it's the sound of a man whose day has already been too long; Cam has no sympathy).

"Why don't you go fuck yourself, Colonel?" Sam asks (like it's a real question and she really wants to know the answer). "I mean, Dani could, but…" she looks pointedly toward the floor, where Jackson shows no signs of intending to become conscious any time soon.

"I don't think so, Colonel," Reynolds says (sounding like he can do brinksmanship till Doomsday; Cam's pretty sure Doomsday's middle name is Samantha Eileen Carter). "Now if you'll--"

"Or maybe Cam's more your type? Fine piece of ass there. Suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, too," Sam adds sweetly.

Reynolds looks toward him, and Cam's pretty sure the man is expecting him to strike Sammygirl dead. Cam blows him a kiss instead.

"I would appreciate your cooperation," Reynolds says, in tones that make the sentence say _'I would appreciate the chance to rip off your heads and shit down your throats.'_

"Why sure," Cam says. "Because we've gotten so much of yours. Sam, let the nice man feel you up. It's probably the only fun he gets around here."

Sam isn't carrying anything. After that Cam takes pity on Reynolds (doesn't want to spend the next for-fucking- _ever_ talking T out of breaking out to whack the guy) and searches T for them. Tosses them T's shirt so they can see there's nothing in it and pats down his trousers so they can see there's nothing in 'em but T. Reynolds nods, satisfied.

"May we go now, Mother?" Cam asks.

"Don't go too far," Reynolds answers, giving him a graveyard smile.

#

They've been gathered here so they can be counted. Cam can count as well as anybody else. Nineteen teams (two of them five-man) is seventy-eight people. Take away four (Colonel Black and company) and you get seventy-four. Try as he might, Cam can't get the count in here above fifty-four. Five teams missing, and Cam pretty much can't tell one from the next by sight, but right now he can say _for sure_ _Tok'ra_ -Him and his all-Jaffa kazoo band is among the missing. The SG-1 with both O'Neill and him on it (five-man team) isn't here. One of the two male Jacksons is gone (and there's only one thing Cam's willing to bet on about any of the Gatecrashers, but it's that none of them would take off and leave the others behind, even the fucking _Tok'ra_ ). Doesn't see the skittery Sam in the really ugly glasses, either.

The three of them (the four of them, but Jackson's still out, so she don't get a vote) take up a position as far from the door as they can get, since they don't want to go anywhere anyway. (Twenty-nine hours till _Prometheus_ reaches the singularity.) The noise level in here's deafening. He sees Cammie and Doc Fraiser both approach the door and get turned back with brandished guns. None of the locals're in the room with them; but there're two Marine units on the door (one just inside to watch them, one just outside, and Cam bets there are reinforcements outside his sightline).

"I would give a month's pay to know what the fuck," he says. He's keeping his voice down, so he turns his head so Sam can read his lips.

"Cheap at the price," she answers. "I was working up some calculations based on the data they archived about six years ago when an alternate Janet Fraiser came through into their reality when that bastard Reynolds came in with a bunch of SFs and told us we had to come back down to 24 right the fuck now. No explanation. Just 'get on your ass and follow me.'"

"Pretty sure that ain't how the Good Book goes," Cam tells her.

" _'And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day,'_ " Teal'c quotes, and his voice rolls deep, tolling out like funeral bells.

If there's one thing in all this Cam regrets, it's not getting the chance to go home to North Carolina one last time. "Yeah," he says, smiling at Teal'c. "Now _that's_ what I'm talkin' about."

"Indeed," Teal'c says, bowing in acknowledgement.

Since ain't no more reason to play nice at all, Cam pulls out his cigarettes and lights up. Reynolds could come in here and play slap-hands with him, but Cam wouldn't lay any bets on him getting' out again.

A couple of guys (other hims) wander over when they see him smoking. Mostly to get a light. One of them to bum a cigarette, and Cam's in a mellow mood right now (mainly 'cause Reynolds looks like he'd really like to _shoot him_ ; yeah, that'll never get old). Cam's not sure what to expect when he sees little Doc Fraiser marching over to them. Probably gonna deliver an anti-smoking lecture.

"You can just hand over that pack right now, Colonel," she says, stopping right in front of him. "It's either a cigarette or homicide, and I don't have a gun."

"Sorry, doc," he says. "I had a gun, but they took it." He passes her the pack, and holds the lighter for her. She sucks the smoke down like a pro.

"Jumped-up, incompetent, pompous--" She reads Fat Fuck out of the book like a pro, too, and all without going above 'damn'. Cam's just as glad Fat Fuck and his pack of Old Golds are occupying her right now, so he don't have to explain why one of the three of them ain't clasping the resupine Jackson to their bosom. In the first place, it's a good way to get gouged or bitten while she's still groggy. In the second place, either Jackson wakes up fine in her own good time or Cam heads on up to the Infirmary and makes sure Sergeant Alvarez don't leave it.

Doc Fraiser takes a last drag off her cigarette, tosses it to the floor, and grinds it out. Says, "I really shouldn't," and tips a second one out of his pack before handing the rest back to him. He takes one for himself and tucks the pack back into his shirt before lighting her up. And they might need to talk about their feelings now (about their feelings for their favorite caliber handgun for close-in work; personally, Cam favors the good old HK G36, especially with the aftermarket grenade-launcher and the 100-round drum -- a little lightweight, but it gets the job done) except he's saved from that by Jackson deciding to rejoin the living. And Fraiser must of won Teal'c's heart (for the second time? Cam wonders) because T stops her from trying to _help_.

"Fucking cunt cock-knocking whorebitch _fuck_ ," Jackson says, sitting up and clutching her head. "Is he dead? Where are my glasses?"

"Somebody's in the Infirmary," Cam says, "so I'm thinkin' you're off your game. Probably kept your glasses to remember you by."

" _Fuck,_ " Jackson says again, feelingly.

"Upsie-daisy, sweet thing," Cam says (but he's no idiot; he lets T do the heavy lifting).

She leans against T's chest like he's a brick wall and closes her eyes. "I know something you don't know," she says.

"Today's trivia category ain't ' _Goa'uld_ System Lords I Have Fucked', Jackson, you gotta do better'n that. We all had plenty of time to count the house and come up five teams shy of a Happy Meal."

"Four," Jackson corrects (eyes still shut, smirking). "The fifth one's in the brig. I got down to 28."

"And I just _know_ you're gonna tell me why you didn't stop in to visit our gear," Cam says.

"Because the fucking Armory was fucking guarded, you fucking asshole. The brig wasn't guarded at all." She shrugs and refuses to wince, although Cam's pretty sure it's too bright in here for her. "Pop quiz: what would make Candy Pants Landry pee himself? Answer: an escape attempt. I guess they thought the Atoniek armbands would make it possible. They wanted to get out through the Gate. But your handprint's been locked out of the system after last night. Trying to open the iris set off a fuckton of alarms and sealed the Gate Room. The guards picked them off like fish in a barrel."

"Sounds like you had a nice long chat," Cam says.

"Not much else to do while I was trying to shut down the fucking force field generator with nothing but a set of lockpicks and some pious thoughts. Figured if I let them out they'd kill Landry and Butt-Boy'd have no choice but to recall the _Prometheus._ " She opens her eyes to look at him and shrug (closest to an apology he'll get from Jackson, ever). She knows that wasn't the plan, but … horse, barn, what'cha gonna do?

Doc Fraiser clears her throat (not precisely uncomfortable, but to remind Jackson she's not family-only here), and Jackson turns her head to look at her. "Don't tell me you weren't thinking of it, Janet," Jackson says, deadly flat. "Cassie still alive back where you come from? Make you all warm and tingly thinking of her puking blood while she dies? Crying for you? Thinking she just took a little detour around Hanka?"

"Stop it," Fraiser says. "You--" _'You don't know.'_ (Cam knows she's about to say that; people always do for some reason.)

"I know you bled out in my arms begging me to take care of her. I know six months later she was dead because I didn't," Jackson says, in the same flat voice. Then she smiles brightly and turns back to Cam. "So I ran out of time. Guards saw me on the monitors and came running. I faked a fall into the force shield and pitched a fit, and when the jackass came to see if I was okay I shoved the scalpel I had into his throat. I was going for his gun. He had backup."

"Virtue is its own reward," Cam tells Jackson solemnly. He's a little surprised Doc Fraiser hasn't cut and run (he's watching her out of the corner of his eye), but she hasn't. When he looks back at her full on (wary and curious), there's neither pity or fear in her expression.

"I am very sorry," Doc Fraiser says (slow and careful, like the words are heavy stones she's carrying up a hill) "that you -- and your world -- exist. And I will do anything I have to in order to keep mine from turning into yours. Do you understand me? Anything. I _have_ to get home with what I know."

Cam glances at Sam, 'cause he knows T can take a hit or two off an _intar_ and stay up, and Doc Fraiser has _Tok'ra_ Boy on her team. The Wildfire Protocol runs sixty hours before the final destruct sequence kicks in, and it don't need a handprint, just codes. They can break out of here, seal the Base, take their hostages (shove anyone they don't want to waste time guarding through the Gate to the Alpha Site; he'd just as soon machine-gun 'em, but the other Gatecrashers might disagree, Cam suspects), and whistle _Prometheus_ back on the threat of executing everyone here.

But the plan ain't foolproof, and ain't no point if Sam don't think she and her quantum girlfriends can pull a rabbit out of their collective ass before they all have to give the SGC back. Because nobody here's gonna want to help them to anything but an early grave after that.

Sam shakes her head a fraction. Nothing. Or nothing soon enough to count for anything. He looks at Fraiser and shakes his head. "Could be we might take this place and hold it a few days. Even keep _Prometheus_ from droppin' her egg twenty-eight hours from now. But less'n we put in the fix and get _gone_ 'fore they come knockin', we'd be fucked without lube. Sam don't think she can do it that quick." He does his best imitation of somebody who gives a flying fuck: in twenty-eight hours _Prometheus_ seals the singularity and they all become the components of a human bomb. "Guess we gotta hope we can all kiss and make up and our little brain trust can get that door open from this side."

"You think she, ah, _they_ can?" Fraiser asks. She wants to believe, or at least to hope. Cam can tell. He's a little sorry for her. He remembers how much hope used to hurt.

"Ma'am," Cam says (selling the sizzle as fervently as he ever lied to Snakehead or Alliance), "I don't even know if we're gonna be let outta this room again. I kinda hope so."

She nods a little jerkily. "Yeah. Me too."

"Wish I had a better word for you, ma'am."

"I wish you did too, Colonel. Take care of yourself. Take care of your team." She forces a smile and turns away, walking off with her back very straight.

"Sprain anything?" Jackson asks, when Fraiser's out of earshot.

"Fuck you, honey," Cam answers without heat.

"I wish to hell someone would," Jackson grumbles.

#

1700, 1800 … They haven't gotten coffee, dinner, two aspirin, or access to the potty since they got shoved in here; if Fat Fuck plans to keep them here much longer without even latrine breaks he might have another riot on his hands. It's gotten quiet (if there's one thing SG-1 knows, it's how to spend time in prison). Somebody's got a deck of cards, and some kind of game's going on out in the middle of the room. A couple of people unlaced their boots to play cat's cradle. Jackson and T are playing chess in their heads (probably chess, could be Pac-Man for all Cam knows). They probably aren't the only ones. Sam's dozing against his shoulder.

Around 1830 two of the missing teams are herded in to the room at gunpoint, hands folded on their heads. Male Jackson is looking murderous, the Cam with him looks miserable (they're the set Cam saw kissing last night; too bad he'll never know what's behind their current tantrums; it'd relieve the boredom). The Teal'c with them looks almost cranky enough to be real, and their Sam looks like she just found out where babies _really_ come from. Cam hopes she hasn't figured out Bill Lee is an incompetent fucktard, but if she took off mid-afternoon, she's had less lab-time than Sam has, and he trusts Jackson to have covered her tracks. A little more than twenty-six hours to the start of the countdown to won't-matter-anymore.

The other team is one of the five-man oddballs: the four of "them" plus a guy Cam doesn't recognize. Sam wakes up to say he's an alien named Nyan, one of the SGC's collection of strays. Worked at the SGC for about four years, then asked to go back home after the Spring Surprise. Jackson thinks that's funny. Cam figures later will be time to ask. Or maybe never. Jackson's idea of funny isn't disturbing so much as exhausting.

The new arrivals mean a chance for some hard news, though, and everyone gathers round. The four teams that _didn't_ make a break for the Bitch Gate planned their breakout from the moment Fat Fuck gave his little Fireside Chat. They meant to work together to get out of the SGC, split up to travel to their rendezvous point (Other Him ain't saying what it is; there's two SG-1s still out there), meet up, and do what they meant to do from there. No way of knowing if they'd'a got away clean if _Tok'ra_ -Him hadn't took a notion to crash the Gate.

It's another two hours before they bring in the next runners. They're in civvies and looking smug. _'If I am captured by enemy forces I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and to aid others to escape. I will accept neither parole nor special favors from the enemy. If captured, it is the duty of every member of the armed forces to monopolize as much of the enemy's military resources as possible in keeping the individual prisoner…'_

By now their captors -- and they're all thinking of themselves as prisoners now and not just fucked-over castaways -- have had to give them access to the privies (one at a time and under guard, and Cam's pretty sure this ain't the glamorous life Reynolds signed up for). They bring in a couple of cases of Cokes and bottled water too (thank fuck), and the three of them take the opportunity to knock back a Special each (Jackson out in the open, since it's supposedly her allergy meds, and she palms two more and passes 'em off to him and Sam). They'll flunk their next pee tests, but Cam's never been good at tests anyway.

This set got all the way downtown, stole a couple of cars and a motorcycle, and got halfway to Denver before getting clocked at a checkpoint. They look pretty fucking cheerful about it, too. They're still cheerful when they're pulled out (one by one) and sent back in again in BDUs. Their Mitchell tells Reynolds if he'd known they was having a sleepover party here tonight, he'd'a picked up some pizzas on his way in.

It's easing up on 2100 when they finally bring in the last team. They look like they been in a small war -- scuffed-up, bruised, and filthy. They also look really damned pleased with themselves.

Jackson sits up and looks interested when they come in, and stares at the doorway like it's the most fascinating TV show _ever._ When nobody besides the four of them comes in -- and nobody else comes in -- and nobody else comes in -- she sits back. "What's wrong with this picture?" she asks softly, looking like somebody just handed her a foolproof bypass to the self-destruct mechanism. Or maybe promised her a pony.

"I could not say," Cam answers. "Four teams went off the rez. They got four back. Zero-sum game."

"Nope," Jackson says happily. "They lost two four-man teams and two five-man teams. They got back one five-man team and three four-man teams."

"The O'Neill from the second team is still missing," Teal'c says.

Jackson rolls her eyes. "We don't know which team is which and neither do they. I'm me on three of the four runners -- including his -- and there's not a lot of physical variation. You saw. First thing I'd do the moment I got out would be swap tags and uniforms. Maybe even members."

"Confusion to the enemy," Sam says.

"They weren't tryin' to get out at all. They were tryin' to get _O'Neill_ out," Cam says in realization. It's a gorgeous boondoggle. No idea what their plan is, but Cam wishes 'em Godspeed.

#

They take him out last.

Once they got everybody but the missing O'Neill (the only one who came through; he's supposed to be back at the SGC protecting 'em from politicians and other living things, and if there was one of him here -- instead of him being _dead_ \-- they wouldn't be up Shit Creek without even a fucking rowboat) they start pulling 'em out again in ones and twos, starting with the runners. They're doin' it by name and the algorhythim each of them Gated in from. So Cam's new name is "Colonel Cameron Mitchell P7R-14B". Catchy.

As a kind of consolation prize, they bring in sandwiches (finally), racked up in boxes, reminding Cam of late-night planning sessions and all the times the world was gonna end a-fucking-gain. They pass 'em hand-to-hand back through the room, since Reynolds may be local, but he ain't fucking _stupid_ : none of his grunts comes in.

Specials cut your appetite, but Cam knows Jackson didn't eat lunch and he bets Sam didn't either. He takes two sandwiches and bitches 'em into eating at least half a one each. T don't eat. Jaffa thing, on account a they're all gonna die. It's a religious thing, and T's as close to atheist as Jaffa get (chucked the State religion when he hooked up with the _Tau'ri_ , got their kitchen-comfort way of believing -- in Kheb and that lot -- beat out of him along the way, same as Sam's morals and Jackson's sanity) but there's some things you just do on account of it'd feel wrong not to. So T gets in his mourning for them ahead of time, 'cause he won't be here to do it after.

2330, and nobody they've taken out has come back.

"Colonel Mitchell. I would welcome your advice," Teal'c says.

Cam nods. He's known this was coming ever since Reynolds called the first Mitchell out. "Can't make this an order," he says. "Think we're a little past that. _Prometheus_ should be at P3W-451 in about 22 hours. Either they die there, fail but make it back, or succeed. For what it's worth, I don't think the locals are killing anyone they take outta here. Asking 'em what they know, yeah, but hell: we all been tortured before. Either they find O'Neill and give it up, or just give it up anyway. I'm thinking it ain't gonna make a lick a difference whether we go hard or whether we go easy."

Jackson glances at Sam. "If the SGC is selling us out, Homeworld and the IOA are probably lined up to do worse."

"Should have gone down shooting," Sam says bitterly.

"Didn't know," Cam says, cutting off that line a talk. Should'a'll rip your heart out an' eat it. "Made the best call we could, down the line."

Teal'c nods, taking it all in, and bows, all formal. " _Tal shakka mel; kra'mel'kara,_ " he says, and Cam's been around the block long enough to know that much'a the lingo. _I die free. I know you will die with honor._

He's not sure about honor. Hasn't figured he's had much of that for a while. He's hoping for a good death, though, whatever that is.

They're about twenty down when Sam's number is called. She turns her back on Reynolds; he's about to call her again when she moves into T's arms. T gets his hands under her ass and hitches her up to the penthouse level so the two of them can really go to town. Jackson lights up like Fourth of July, and Cam knows it's not the sex (though Sam and T fucking is damned pretty and he and Jackson both like to watch it), but the message they're sending out loud and clear to anybody looking: _this is goodbye._

Then T sets her down, and strokes her cheek on the scarred side, and Sam smiles up at him, and Cam wonders how you say _I'm gonna sell my ass dear_ in _Goa'uld_.

When she turns to him, Cam imagines he can taste T on her mouth. She kisses like 'dare you' and 'fuck you', and he met her in the middle of a someone else's war and they've played tag-you're-dead across too many battlefields to count ever since. Sam Carter, to him, is the smell of grease and gunpowder and C4. Sweat and decay and blood, crisp sky and adrenaline and mud. His world and hers. Earth and sky and the murdering stars.

She lets him go and Cam doesn't get a chance for last licks or lingering glances, because Jackson grabs a handful of Sam's shirt, hooks a heel around her ankle to knock her off balance, and hauls her around. Their kiss is only a heartbeat longer than a slap, then Sam steps back and turns and walks away. Jackson stares at nothing at all, and the whole room is tense until Sam's out and down the hall and nothing happens.

After that their jailers cherry-pick a few random Sams. No way they could be going for information on the breakout or O'Neill's whereabouts with 'em, and only a moron'd think any of the Gatecrashers'd be holding back information that'd let 'em _go home_. The Hers have quick whispered conferences with the Hims as they're called; one of them kisses one of the hims goodbye.

Doc Fraiser tries to argue when they call her number (nice of them to bother with that; far as Cam can tell, she's the only one of her here). She don't get her stay of execution, and when a couple of Reynolds' men put their hands on her to hustle her out, they have to drop about a dozen people, including the other three members of her team. Cam and Teal'c don't move. Frasier's little _Tok'ra_ fuck should'a thought about what'd happen while it was telling the local girl it was okay to screw all of them to the wall. What goes around comes around.

0200\. Roughly sixteen hours now since _Prometheus_ left Earth orbit. Maybe another twenty hours till she gets to P3W-451, but nobody here's gonna know if the local SG-1 and their Gatecrasher helpmeets turned up the card with the lady on it (one chance in three) until they all die. Cam guesses if he can ask one favor out of the universe, it'd be a chance to see Colonel Nice face-to-face just one more time and let him know what he's done for being in such a goddamned hurry to jump when that lardass fuck who signs his orders says 'Frog'.

Jackson's turn. She smiles at both of them as she gets to her feet (faint and cool and her eyes don't smile but they never do) and walks away like she's going for coffee. Cam expects trouble at the door, but it don't come, even when Reynolds makes Jackson turn so they can quick-tie her hands behind her back.

"Fuck if I want to walk that far," Cam says (randomly), and gets up to move closer to the door, Teal'c beside him. He lights up when he gets to the spot he's picked. Came in here with three packs and a bit, but he's been smoking more'n usual an sharing out a lot more'n usual. Only about half a pack left. Won't matter much, he guesses. He lights up again. Smiles at Reynolds. Reynolds smiles back. _Not too long until I can walk in there and break your neck for you, my boy._

Cam's looking forward to it.

Archaeologist Barbie is the next one out. She's the first of them Cam's seen to actually look scared -- even Glasses Geek Sam just looked like she was planning to call the cops soon as she could find her cellphone -- but she pats her Cam's arm like she's reassuring him, and hugs her Teal'c, and walks up to Reynolds like she's going to her own execution. She still comes up too fast for his sergeant's nerves, though, and when the guy swings up his _intar_ she jerks back, one hand up in surrender, the other over her stomach. There's a pause while Reynolds changes his sergeant out for someone else less fussy, then Reynolds beckons her up, and out she goes.

Cam's just tossed his butt-end to the ground when they call for Teal'c P75-14B. "You be good now," Cam says.

"I shall be excellent, Colonel Mitchell," T says. Man what told half the System Lords to piss into the wind ain't gonna lose sleep over a bunch of fucking _Tau'ri._ The thought comforts Cam some.

Teal'c kisses him without haste. T don't hurry 'cept when he needs to. He walks off with his guards like he's doin' 'em a favor. Reynolds goes along personal.

#

When it's Cam's turn, they bring him along and shackle him to the table in a little room on 16. His boy Reynolds, who came along to make sure Cam didn't get lonely, takes the chance to frisk him down and take everything out of Cam's pockets: cigarettes, lighter, tube of Specials, his picture of Belle and the kids, the empty titanium cigarette tube. Reynolds opens it to check and shakes out the T3s wrapped in a twist of paper. After that, for some dumbass Yankee reason, Reynolds decides it's necessary for his Jarhead boyfriend to hold a pistol to Cam's head while Reynolds pulls off Cam's boots and tosses 'em in the corner so Cam gets to wait on the Apocalypse in his stocking feet. Can't tell from the feel of the barrel pressed against his skull whether it's _intar_ or real -- still pretty sure they ain't killing prisoners, but they might be willing to make an exception at least in his case, on account of how much he and Reynolds mean to each other.

He kinda thought handcuffing him to the table was just for their entertainment until their I-Team came in and switched on the monitor even before getting into 'Hi, how ya doin', kneel before your god.'

Three of the feeds are live -- at least, they show a current time-code in the bottom corner. One shows him (from up and behind, not his best angle), one shows Sam just the same way, only there's no I-Team in the room. Third one shows T, all strapped down to a bed, breathing mask over his face, tubes running into his arm. Fourth is just a black square, and Cam wonders if Jackson is dead.

"Aw, foot," Cam says, smiling at them heavy-lidded and sleepy-eyed. He's got himself a matched set here, boy and girl, and if he could just fit 'em into his luggage he could take 'em home and breed 'em and the world'd never lack for assholes again. "You're jus' funnin' with me, now." Table's bolted to the floor; he's already tried to move it.

"What you're watching now, as you can see, is a live feed. What you're about to see is footage taken approximately two hours and five minutes ago."

Missy Light Colonel pulls a remote out of her ass and pushes a button, and the screen blanks for a minute and comes up again showing a full-screen image of an Interrogation Room that looks a lot like this one, just empty. Just for a second, though, because a Marine staggers into view and then two more show up hanging onto Jackson for dear life. They probably think Jackson's trying to escape. Cam knows she's actually out to _kill them._

There's two, maybe three minutes of back-and-forth on the tape, while Cam wonders why they don't just stun Jackson the fuck into oblivion and she breaks somebody's nose with a head-butt. She's trying to get out of the quick-ties -- Cam can see the blood on her wrists -- but she needs a little more time than she gets. Sudarkasa comes running in when three of the Marines have Jackson face-down over the table, and Sudarkasa don't even stop to swab or see skin, just punches her needle into the first chunk of Jackson she can reach. Once Jackson stops thrashing, they throw her on her back on the table and Sudarkasa looks at her pupils and takes a pulse. Gives her a second injection into skin, swabbing this time.

Missy hits another button. Now all four feeds are live. Jackson's in a bed, strapped down like the T-man, but without the bells and whistles.

"Colonel Mitchell, would you care to explain why your team is so … adversarial?" her partner, Major Ladyboy, asks.

"Sure thing, darlin'," Cam says. "Any time you want to unchain me the fucking fuck from this goddamned table and get your ass in gear and _send us home._ "

That's not the end of the conversation. They ask him where Colonel O'Neill is, who the people in the photograph are, why he kissed Teal'c, if he's aware Dr. Jackson is dangerously unstable. Cam makes up answers in his head and doesn't say any of them out loud. _("Colonel O'Neill got a promotion and he's in charge of Stargate Command." "The photograph came in my box of Wheaties." "What you really want to know is if T an' me are fucking, and the answer's 'yes', 'cause we all fuck each other, and both of you look like you're in desperate need of a good fucking, you don't mind me sayin' so." "Jackson ain't 'dangerously unstable,' she's batshit crazy, what's the problem?")_

Finally, to his relief, they get around to what passes for threats here in Disneyworld: it will be _'better for him'_ if he cooperates.

"Or you'll _what,_ bitches?" Cam asks, rattling his cuffs. "Tell me you're gonna lock me up so you can keep everything here the way you like it? Your fat fuck of an incompetent general already did that. Oh yeah. I forgot the part where he said he didn't care about anybody's problems but his, but all of us were welcome to help him come an solve 'em for him. But hey. I guess you only want _nice_ people doin' that."

That's pretty much that. When they leave, Lt. Colonel Doris McCabe and Major Elijah Guerrero (Cam makes a point of getting' their names on the off chance he'll be able to kill them before he dies), take all his stuff with them, including the photo of his wife and kids. He gets to sit around for another half hour or so, trying not to mind that he's chained up with his back to the fucking door. He gets a look at his watch after they leave. 0607, so it's about eighteen hours to the singularity. He doesn't think Sam's gonna peach, and they might (eventually) put it together about Jackson asking questions yesterday, but hey. Jackson's _crazy._

Dorrie and Lije left the cameras live, so at least there's television. T and Jackson are pretty boring, but the I-is-for-Idiot team's next stop is Sam. They must not show her any video, because she don't look around at the camera, but from what Cam can tell, his Sammygirl ain't being a good Do-bee either.

Eventually four SFs loaded for bear come to fetch him. They cuff his hands behind him, but Cam wouldn't run if he could. You run out on your team if your mission's more important than their lives. If you're escaping now to rescue them later. Or if you just want to piss off the fucks before they bring you down. There's no mission and no rescue, and he can't piss off the fucks enough to make it worth the effort.

He pads sock-footed down the hall to a room where they unshackle him and herd him in and tell him to strip to his skivvies. The alternative is being zatted or _intar'ed_ , so he does, but it really gets on his last nerve that he loses his watch and his tags. There's a set of scrubs on the single bunk; Cam wonders if the Shiny Happy SGC is gonna try to find seventy-odd single rooms, or if the good children will get multiple occupancy cells.

Without a watch it's a little hard to tell the time. He gets breakfast, lunch, and dinner (trays, armed guards, back against the wall hands on your head Colonel Mitchell please) and he figures _Prometheus_ has gotten where she's going and the clock's ticking by the time the corridor lights go down to Third Shift levels. About then he crashes and sleeps like the fucking _dead_ , rolling off his bunk and coming up in a crouch when the door opens with breakfast. He and his minders spend a happy couple minutes exchanging demands (up against the wall versus where's my team) before Cam wakes up enough to remember what prison he's currently in. When they put the tray down and leave (there's a table -- bolted to the wall -- but no chair) Cam tosses the contents down the crapper in favor of more sleep. Paper plates and plastic utensils anyway. Fuckers.

Room service wakes Cam up again at lunchtime, and by then he's slept-out and thoroughly bored. Nothing much to do in here but sleep, pace, or jack off, and he's done sleeping and hates the footing in the hospital slippers, so he jacks off, staring up at the unblinking eye of the security camera. Then he just stares at the ceiling, waiting. He's good at that.

When they bring his dinner tray, his jailers still make him back up against the wall, but this time one of the SFs asks Cam if there's anything he wants.

"A six-pack of Coors, a pack of Old Golds, an' a whore to fuck," he says. "I'll skip the beer an' cigarettes if you want to bring me my fucking team, airman."

"Sir, uh, yes, sir," the airman says, ducking back out the door. Cam doesn't think he's getting either his kids or a hooker, though. He lies on the bed making lists of things to ask for. Doesn't think he'll get any of 'em -- doesn't even intend to ask -- but it passes the time. He puts everything on three lists: _Maybe_ , _Doubtful_ , and _No Fucking Way_. On the _'Maybe'_ list goes a shitton of ibuprofen and a big pot of coffee, 'cause his head fucking hurts and so do his bumps and bruises. On the _'Doubtful'_ list goes a visit with Sam. Beer and a blowjob is definitely on the _'No Fucking Way'_ list, but nice to think about. Ain't putting impossible things even on the _'No Fucking Way'_ list, like not being here in the first place or having a way to get home. Knows there ain't no warning before the onset of 'Not My Dimension, Monkeyboy', but once it starts, he really looks forward to Sam explaining it to the local fucks. Sometime tomorrow, if all the guesswork's right. Fat Fuck should deliver a truly _memorable_ speech then.

He's bored, itchy, annoyed, and quietly and profoundly _enraged_ that it ain't the steel spiders, the alien snakes, even the Space Mafia that's gonna hang SG-1's scalps on the wall -- it's a slimy bureaucrat in a parallel universe who ain't even exactly out to kill them. (Fucking figures.) He isn't expecting -- about the time he's trying to decide between sleep, beating off again, and tuning up the guys on the door -- for that door to open and an airman to come in with his BDUs and boots. (They still have an _intar_ on him, thank fuck, or he'd have to rush the door just to keep his self-respect.) And would the Colonel please put his britches on, because the General would like a word with him?

Well, he's happy to. (He'd shave, too, only nobody seems to've left him a razor.) Clean socks and undies, too, so he makes sure to toss his tshirt over the security camera before he dresses. They've given him back his watch and his tags (but not the rest of his shit), so Cam can see it's 2230. Twenty-four hours, more or less, after _Prometheus_ sealed the singularity. If they'd all been left together in one place it'd probably be all over by now.

He wishes it was. But another day isn't too long to wait.

They don't handcuff him when they take him out this time, but one of his guards is twelve feet back along the corridor, and it's even money the fucker can drop Cam before Cam can take out the other four and get a weapon off one of them. Home team loses its advantage the moment they take him into the elevator, though, and he's bored enough to want to take the nursery to school.

They don't go down, though. They head off into one of the big Iso rooms. And don't it go to show: ain't just him Fat Fuck wants to chat up. He makes eighteen: sixteen other Cameron Mitchells and one Jack O'Neill. (Fuck.)

The room's set up with chairs and a coffee service, just like they weren't prisoners with their teams being held hostage. He heads over to the wall. He's filling his cup when the SFs bring in the last of the set: his little _Tok'ra_ buddy. The only version of him still missing is the one who went on _Prometheus_.

 _Tok'ra_ -Him shrugs off his minders and walks through the door. Cam expects the Marines to follow it in, but they step out and shut the door behind it. _(Nobody in here but us chickens.)_ _Tok'ra_ -Him looks around the room and then leans against the wall beside the door. About half the hims here are sitting down. O'Neill's leaning against the back wall. There's a click -- live mike -- and the observation deck goes bright. Fat Fuck and Butt-Boy are up there.

"Gentlemen -- and lady -- please be seated," Fat Fuck says. A couple of hims sit down. Cammie Mitchell doesn't. "I have good news for all of you. SG-1 has discovered a way to reverse the space-time rupture and invert the convergence effect." There's a beat of silence, and Cam can see Fat Fuck regarding all of them expectantly. "You can all go home! To your own universes!"

"Ah… Hank? Henry?" O'Neill is waving a hand languidly, like he's waiting to be called on in class. "It's not that I don't _trust_ you and everything. It's just that… I don't _believe_ you."

For a minute Cam's almost sure Fat Fuck's gonna demand to know why not, but the moment passes.

"Three hours ago, _Prometheus_ contacted Stargate Command to say they were scrapping the mission to the singularity and returning to Earth," Fat Fuck says.

"Little late, wouldn't you say?" O'Neill asks, glancing ostentatiously at his wristwatch. "Unless they took a wrong turn at Albuquerque. I do that all the time."

"It turns out they were … misled … by the Alternate SG-1 that accompanied them," Fat Fuck says. "They were only recently able to regain control of the ship."

Cam can't help it. He laughs out loud. "Jesus Christ," he says. "It took you fucktards _this long_ to figure out they were setting you up?"

"Do you have something you want to mention, Colonel Mitchell?" Fat Fuck asks. He's going for a terrifying growl, but he sounds more like an annoyed dachshund.

"No, no," Cam says. "You just go right on ahead convincing us you're tellin' us the truth, sweetheart. 'Cause you wouldn't'a gone this far if there wasn't something you want."

What Fat Fuck wants (says it without sayin' it) is for all of them to back their people down and make 'em play nice. He ends up playing back the recording of the whole conversation with _Prometheus_ , so they all get to hear that "Black" SG-1 ripped Reality a new one on purpose in order to come here. Local Carter don't say why, but she's real clear on the fact they meant to go home when they were done. Yeah. Because Cam bets the Black Team knew all along that Entropic Cascade Failure wasn't just a fucking _suggestion_.

Just about everybody starts talking once the transmission ends. Colonel Cammie stalks right up under the observation window, hands on hips, and cuts right to the chase: "So when the hell can we _leave_ , beggin' your pardon, General, sir? We've all got places to be -- an' I know you're wantin' to resume normal operations here."

Fat Fuck hems and haws about _Prometheus_ heading back for Earth at top speed, but how it's gonna be two or three days before she's here and they're set up to turn the singularity inside out and that's why he wanted to inform all of them as soon as possible and blah blah blah cooperation blah blah understanding blah patience blah. Cam tunes most of it out, but about then it hits him.

He's going to live. They all are. He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes.

"For a man who gets to go home, you don't look very happy, Mitchell," O'Neill says quietly.

"Sir." Cam's eyes snap open. O'Neill's looking at him inquisitively, standing far enough away that Cam doesn't feel threatened. "I… This's how I look when I'm happy. 'Cause I guess it don't matter if I tell you -- I mean, you know, whether it's true or not -- but Sam and Jackson, they figured the whole thing about us not dyin' from bein' here, that was 'cause the rift was open. Soon's it got itself sealed, we'd all pretty much be dead in about two days."

O'Neill raises his eyebrows. "Any reason you didn't mention this to Hank?" he asks mildly.

"Jackson's just pretty much batshit insane, sir," Cam says (just a bit pridefully), "an' Sam had a theory, but these fucks liked theirs better. Nobody gonna give us a listen with the Black Team feeding 'em just what they wanted to hear right down the line."

O'Neill nods like this makes sense to him. "Water under the bridge now," he says. The words are casual, but his eyes aren't. Cam nods. _Message received._ He'll keep his mouth shut. He may be of two minds about living, but he sure as fuck wants to go home.

#

By the time Cam gets back down to 24 just about everybody's back there, including _Tok'ra_ -Him and its three Jaffa. That's around noon the next day. First he gets to spend one last night in the Lockup Hilton, then it's breakfast, shower, shave, and Sam. She's heard they're all going home, but she doesn't believe it until she gets chapter and verse from him. Then the two of them are escorted to the Infirmary to wake up T. He starts coming around as soon as they take the breathing mask off (it's hard to keep a snaked Jaffa out cold), and if he and Sam weren't right there, there'd be murder done. Cam knows they'd never get away without a bloodbath even so if he didn't lean real heavy on all of them needing to suck it up so they can get the fucking fuck out of here, but then they all go and stare at Jackson for a while. Dr. Lam says they've withdrawn the sedation, but how she probably won't wake up at all until tomorrow. Cam tells her -- several times -- that she is to _get him_ the moment Jackson shows any sign of consciousness. Lam gives him the stinkeye and says there were traces of amphetamines found in Jackson's bloodstream, which has exactly _shit_ to do with anything, as Cam is happy to tell her.

"It's fuckin' government-issue crank, sugartits, so it's gotta be good for you. And if I don't get it back before we leave, I am gonna be seriously pissed. Now is that about it, or do you want to tell me to give up smokin' while you're on a roll?"

He honestly doesn't remember Carolyn having quite such a big poker stuck up her ass.

#

Cam isn't interested in being chatty, so he doesn't know much about how anybody else's teams got held. Seriously, who the fuck cares? The three of them pick a bunkroom and bunker down to _wait._ Turns out Carolyn's off about when Jackson's going to rejoin the party by about half a day, and the Infirmary staff doesn't intend to do what he told them, only Jackson starts screaming herself hoarse from the moment she's halfway conscious until the moment she's out of restraints and the only reason she doesn't kill Cam the moment he unstraps her is because she's still clumsy as shit. Teal'c carries her back down to 24 and she sleeps most of the next two days.

Small mercies.

It's closer to four days than three before the local talent finally opens the Bitch Gate so they can _all fucking leave_. Cam doesn't know all the details and he doesn't care. They're sending them back in the order they came through, though (there's an announcement over the PA) so his team's in the last third to go.

As they walk into the Armory, Cam realizes (as they lay out his weapons on the counter) that until just this moment he didn't quite believe it. A trick. A lie. A mistake. Anything but real. But here they are: guns, knives, tac-vest -- even the stuff the interrogators confiscated. He kisses the picture of Annabelle before he puts it in his pocket. It's a ritual.

When they walk from the Armory into the Gate Room, Cam's a little surprised to see the local SG-1 standing there waiting to kiss them goodbye. Whatever.

"Go ahead, Sergeant," Local Carter calls up to the Control Room, and Cam and his team stand behind the "hazard" line as the Gate's inner ring spins and the chevrons lock. "There you are, Colonel Mitchell," she says (just like she's invented subspace), "the wormhole is open to P7R-14B -- in your reality. Once you step through the Event Horizon, you'll be home."

Cam motions his team ahead of him up the ramp and starts to follow. "Going to be good to get home, eh?" Colonel Nice says, and Cam stops.

" _'Home'_ ," he repeats, staring at the Mitchell who belongs here, "I'm not going home. I'm going back to a world where when their neighbors found out I was part of the Program, they hanged my Momma and Daddy, they gang-raped my cousin Jesse, they poured gasoline on her and burned her alive. We're fighting a bunch of fucks who don't give a damn about anything in the universe but power. Not an empire, not worshippers, not building anything to last. Just power. And they're winning. And you know what? I'd _still_ rather be there than here. Here you were willing to sell out nineteen fucking universes. Not even to save your own asses. Just because it was _more convenient._ I think I'd rather deal with the Lucian Alliance."

Colonel Nice might have a snappy answer, but Cam doesn't stay to hear it. His team is waiting for him at the Event Horizon.

When he reaches them, they all step through together.

###


End file.
